The Great Adventure - Day 4 - August 8, 2009

I am a sucker for the small town celebration - for those little blasts of local patriotism and pride that still exist, though in dwindling numbers, in the rural, backroad communities of our country. There's something about the small-time parade through Main Street with the mayor in the back of a convertible, with boy scouts carrying banners, and service orgs manning floats and throwing candy. I like watching the firetrucks and tractors go by and the cars with the ads for the local insurance agency. I cheer for the local beauty queen, even if she finished 5th in the state. Whatever they lack in Hollywood polish they make up for in aw-shucks good old enthusiasm and spontaneity. So I counted it fortunate that our trip to Maine coincided with my folk's home town annual shin-dig, the Patten Pioneer Days!

Patten certainly qualifies as a rural America. There is literally not a stop light for at least ten miles in any direction. There is a single grocery store, one bank, one motel, and I think (as of a couple of months ago) they are down to two restaurants. I had to smile a little a couple of years ago when I heard that the Patten tanning salon was closing. There are two full-time churches, a Methodist church that my folks go to, and a Pentecostal church two doors down, and a "part-time" Catholic church that evidently rotates a priest through every couple of weeks. And Patten is the big town in the area. The countryside around Patten used to boast a lot of dairy and potato farms - my Dad put in a lot of youthful hours in each, but they have mostly folded up now; Patten currently exists mainly because of the timber and logging industries operating in the woods all around it, and the hunting and fishing crowd those same woods and plentiful lakes and streams bring in. They are rightfully proud of their heritage and every year Patten Pioneer Days are held in its honor. The week-long festivities started on Monday with community spaghetti dinners and chicken dinners and every other conceivable kind of dinner held at churches and snow mobile clubs and Shriner halls. We arrived on Friday to catch the climactic weekend events - the consummation of all the celebrating that had gone before.

We started the weekend lazily, still sore and cranky from our car trips. While Stacy and my folks were lollygagging around the house in pajamas, L and N and I grabbed a couple of pails and hit the backyard where Dad had a big old patch of raspberry bushes. There's something in little kids that finds berry picking irresistible. I think it’s in big kids too. We raided Dad's bushes and came back with a quart or so to show for it. A couple of times L forgot how prickly raspberry bushes could be and would burrow her way into a clump, then realize she was surrounded by briars and panic, requiring a scratchy Daddy extraction. We eventually went back inside with our red-stained fingers and red-scratched forearms to get dressed and ready for the big events. The first of which, the Patten Pioneer Days parade, would begin shortly.





Once dressed we drove, like good Californians, to the park to watch the parade. I'll admit to being a little ashamed when I realized that the park was literally three doors down from my parent's house; it took considerably longer to get kids into and out of carseats that it would have taken to walk the 50 yards. But at least we felt like we were able to bring a little bit of LA culture to northern Maine. We were a good half hour early, so the kids played on the gym equipment while we waited. (I was particularly stoked by this cool little back-hoe sand digger plaything that N monopolized.) Grampy was off helping with the prep for the afternoon festivities at the Lumbermen's Museum, but Mimi met us at the park and helped us await the show.




Eventually the moment arrived and we took our seats on the street curb with the vast hordes of Pattenites. It was short and sweet, and chock full of Americana. Reps from the local bank (Katahdin Branch Trust) came by and handed out frozen juice pops to all the kids; Smokey the Bear made an appearance, and what he lacked due to muteness he made up for in jaunty waving. There were firetrucks and snow plows and the local Junior Miss pageant winner. The kids joyfully risked getting squashed by the 18-wheelers as they darted in and out to get the candy being thrown at them - they loved it.











Once the parade concluded Mimi rode off to help at the museum; we walked the half-mile down the road past a number of craft booths and petting zoos to the Methodist church where they were having a bunch of kid game out beside the parsonage. N practiced his jump-roping and L her dart throwing; they both hopped about in the mini-blow-up bouncer. A cupcake walk was held and L and N both won cupcakes. Actually, they were the only ones in the game at the time so the nice lady kept calling numbers until she finally called them both.

Lunch ushered in the next event of the day - the famous Beanhole Dinner at the Lumbermen's Museum. Patten boasts a pretty impressive little museum commemorating the history and practices of the lumbermen who've worked the wood for generations. I've always enjoyed the museum, with all its obscure tools and saws and hooks and unidentifiable twisted metal doohickeys. It looks like a well-organized version of my grandfather's barn. Every year on the Saturday of Patten Pioneer Days the Lumbermen's Museum puts on a Beanhole Dinner, which in and of itself is a worthy museum exhibition. The night before a couple dozen holes are dug in a clearing in the middle of the museum grounds. The holes are three or four feet deep and maybe three feet in diameter. The holes are lined with glowing coals and then big metal cans full of raw beans, water and seasonings are sealed and lowered into them. More coals are piled on top, then the dirt is piled up over the subterranean firepits and the beans are left to cook underground overnight.

The next morning they build a bonfire using enough wood to keep most of the town's widows warm all winter. Using big reflector ovens, huge pans of biscuit dough are set around the bonfire and the biscuits bake via the indirect heat from the fire. Gallons of coffee are boiled over a separate fire in huge cast iron coffee pots. Around 11:00 the crowds start gathering and they dig up a can of beans and begin serving. The meal consists of the baked pork and beans, traditional Maine red hotdogs, the fire-baked biscuits, coffee, huge tubs of Cole slaw, and lots of homemade gingerbread cake and cookies for dessert. It is utterly cool. Mimi was coleslaw czar this year, and Dad was involved in a little of everything. The thing he seemed to enjoy the most was serving up the beans to all the customers with a camp-sized ladle. After eating and walking around the museum buildings a while, we headed back to Mimi and Grampy's house for some of those all-important Maine naps. It was imperative that we be rested up for that evening's final adventure: blueberry picking at Grandma Betty's farm.

Biscuits baking in reflector oven.

My Dad's Dad passed away about eight years ago, but my grandmother (Betty, a.k.a. Grammy, a.k.a. Grammy Betty) still lives in the farm house my Dad grew up in. It is about five miles or so south of Patten and it is surrounded by about 500 acres of what was once a dairy farm. Over the years my grandfather eventually converted the dairy farm over to a potato farm, and then years later, when he'd lost all his cheap labor to college, he planted the whole farm with Norwegian spruce trees. That was about 35 years ago. The trees have gotten mighty big. My Dad owns the farm now and spends his days thinning the trees, selectively cutting, and generally maintaining the plantation. I can't imagine him happier. A small field behind the barn was preserved for my grandfathers garden and in later years features lots of strawberry plants. Another field behind the farm house has copious patches of rhubarb. The lawn off the front of the house has apple trees, plum trees and a number of very productive blueberry bushes. We had the blueberries in our sights that night.

Grammy Betty greeted us with hugs, kisses and pails and we were sent down to start pillaging the bushes. A bush will produce berries for several weeks of the summer, so any give bush will have ripe purple berries along with immature, sour red ones and infantile, hard little white ones. We had given N very clear instructions to only pick the big dark berries. He took his commission very seriously. For every single berry he picked he ran over to Grampy and got Grampy to confirm that it was indeed a good berry and not a sour one. N assured Grampy that "if I pick a sour one it was by accident." Eventually Grammy Betty came out too and helped with the picking. The bushes were pretty well loaded and the buckets filled quickly. As the evening descended, so did the mosquitoes, so we eventually headed into the farm house where Grammy Betty had cookies waiting. We consolidated our buckets and had about a gallon of fresh berries. Judging from the purple stains on everyone’s fingers and faces, I expect that an even larger amount were picked, and found their way to places other than berry buckets.

Maine has some of the most dramatic skys!

Back inside the farmhouse.

One the road between the farm and Patten there is an rise, Ash Hill, that opens out to a wonderful view of the countryside for miles and miles; the panorama is dominated by Maine's sentinel mountain, Mount Katahdin in the middle of Baxter State Park about 30 mile away. It sits pretty much alone in an otherwise low-lying country; it is an impressive sight at any time of day, but it is stunning at sunset and sunrise. I've taken pretty much the same picture a hundred different times, and I expect that if I keep going to Patten I'll be taking it a hundred times more. It is ingrained in my head and will always be an iconic image to me.