The Great North Woods

One of Dad's roads on the farm.

My Dad grew up on a dairy farm owned and run by my grandfather Norman in the tiny Northern Maine town of Sherman Station, less than a mile from the Patten town line. Eventually, probably around the time my Dad was in high school, the cows were sold and it was converted over to a potato farm. After college (University of Maine) my Dad moved away and my grandfather didn't want to have to keep up with the potato fields; he changed most of it over to fir tree plantations. Now it is home to several hundred acres of Norwegian Spruce. My Dad bought the farm (literally, not figuratively) from my grandfather when I was five or six, but my grandfather continued to tend it, thinning and trimming, until my Dad retired and he and my Mom moved back up there about ten or eleven years ago. My grandfather has since passed away and now my Dad works the plantations by himself every day weather permitting.

His life and work intrigues and amazes me. Although I consider myself a smart and competent person, I know I would never be able to do what he does. The physical effort alone of felling and cutting and hauling the timber would do me in - trust me, I've worked with him for an hour or two a couple of times and nearly died. But the thing that I know would doom me more than the physical would be my utter lack of what to everyone else up there would be "common man's knowledge." I never cease to be amazed at all the strange and weird nuances of living in such an isolated, harsh, semi-tundra-like climate. My Dad cuts and builds his own roads. He cuts and hauls all his own firewood (anyone with any sense burns wood, not oil, all winter), all my grandmother's firewood, the firewood for the local church and probably for half the widows in the state. He owns and operates huge articulated, Caterpillar-like construction equipment - his bulldozer and "skidder," he calls it. He knows how to run it and maintain it and the hundred things you need to keep in mind so that it runs the next day (or the next season) when you go out to start it. He still manages to break it three or four times a season, but somehow knows how to fix it or get it fixed. He knows the species of every tree on his property, not just his spruce, but the native fir and the few stowaway deciduous. He knows which are ready for cutting and which need a few more years; which are going to start growing badly and should be cut now, and which, if you thin out around them to give them more light, will become mega-valuable trees in another ten years. Granted, he grew up in that environment, and his working career as a paper company chemical engineer kept him closer to it than some jobs might have, but still: how does he know all that? What a ton of micro-specific stuff he has in his head!

4-foot stumpage cut this summer. I learned this year
that this spot used to be called the "Indian Field."

Whenever I go to Maine I always love going out in the woods with him. I'll brave the deerflies and mosquitoes, and depending on the time of year, the knee-deep mud or the freezing temperatures. It's my time to dress up in the flannels or coveralls that all smell like heavy machinery oil. I can wield a chainsaw for 45 minutes (before my arms fall off) and pretend that I could do this for a living if I had to. Of course I couldn't, I know. I'm sure my Dad would have loved it if one of his sons had wanted to take over the farm, but I'm sure he knows that in me, at least, he has a soft city-boy, and has come to accept it. But I still like to pretend, and I think Dad likes it when I go out and admire his handiwork too.