The Great Adventure - Day 6 & 7 - August 10-11, 2009

As I mentioned earlier, I grew up going to camp, and since my grandparents sold it I have been missing those rustic excursions. A couple of months ago, while planning out our vacation, I looked into what commercial camps were in and around Patten. Not knowing what to look for, I didn't turn up much, but my Mom (a.k.a. Mimi) flagged me down with a place out by Shin Pond, only about twelve miles or so from where my folks lived. We checked out the Camp Wapiti website and it looked to be perfect. We booked three nights, starting Monday, once all the Patten Pioneer Days events had wound down.

On Monday we semi-repacked and loaded the kids in the car to head out to camp. Although it was a little out of the way, we swung down to the farm first to see Grammy Betty again. She had promised the kids cookies and they were not going to let her out of the contract. It was a quick visit, and met all the obligations, written or implied, in the cookie contract. While there I had to make a quick "pit stop" and when I got to the bathroom I noticed an old cross-stick work that used to hang in the bathroom "out to camp." I don't know who made it, and it is not by any means a pretty piece, kind of hokey, and certainly not of any intrinsic value - but it hung in the camp from the days of my earliest remembrance and it was with a little flutter of sentimentality that I stumbled upon it then.

Soon we bid goodbye to Grammy Betty and hit the road for Camp Wapiti, getting there around 1pm. It was perfect!, way off in the middle of nowhere at the end of a dirt road, perched at the edge of a private lake called Davis Pond. (Maine is humble when it comes to its lakes; for some unknown reason perfectly decent-sized lakes often get relegated to pond status.) It is owned and operated by a young family, Ryan and Jennifer Shepard. They have two young kids, Wyatt and Madison who were just about our kids’ ages. We met Jennifer right when we got there and she showed us to our cabin, which we immediately loved. Three bedrooms, a living room, a galley kitchen and one and a half baths, it had been build about a hundred years ago. It was pretty rustic and campy, which had worried Mom - she thought it might be too backwoods for us, but it was exactly what I had in mind and fit the bill perfectly. L called it our "cabinet."






Designed to sleep an entourage, every room had multiple beds, usually with a set of bunkbeds. This couldn't have been better in L and N's estimation, and to Mommy's chagrin, they spent most of our stay climbing up and down the beds, poking their heads over the wall-tops where they opened to the common cathedral ceiling. Mean-spirited gravity gave it it's best shot a couple of times, but the kids managed to elude any major trip-to-the-hospital topples. We put Mimi and Grampy in one room, L and N in another. The bedroom Stacy and I claimed was surely a closed-in porch, because there were windows from the livingroom that opened into our bedroom and an open doorway between the two that had the unmistakable signs of prior hinges. When L and N weren't scaling the walls in their bedroom, they were engaged in the game of running into our room, scrambling up a bunkbed ladder within our room, using it to climb through the open window back into the living room, and then stomping back into our bedroom to repeat the process. It is amazing to me how this cycle could be repeated and repeated with no end or abatement to the giggles that each orbit generated.

Mimi and Grampy came out a little later, and Monday afternoon and pretty much all day Tuesday were spent in leisurely and unfocused swimming and canoe/kayaking out on the lake. Both nights we grilled hamburgers, steaks and sausages on the barbecue, and on Tuesday night just as it was getting dark we addressed Stacy's one request for the trip - a moose hunt. Getting some good tips from the owners, we set out for a salt-flat not too far away to catch our glimpses of the woodland cattle. Stacy and Dad rode up in Dad's truck while Mom and I and the kids followed in our rental. L and N and I developed a moose call that was sure to drag them to us in droves. "Moosie-moosie-moosie-moooooooooosie!" I'm surprised we were not stampeded with the intensity of those calls from the backseat. They must have been all at some out of town at some moose convention, however, because they certainly didn't take the moooooosie bait. Regrouping with Dad and Stacy later Stacy had to reluctantly settle for two moose-butts she thinks she saw disappearing into the woods. (By the time our second car got there they were long gone.)

Mimi and Grampy cheered us on from the porch of the lodge.

Out on the moose hunt.
How very National Geographic.

While the moose hunt may not have been spectacular, we did get our share of smaller critter encounters over those first two days. I hadn't been there an hour when I walked down to the lake the first time and stepped on two garter snakes. I'm not a snake-o-phobe, provided I get adequate warning. When something black, wiggly and unexpected shoots off between my feet, however, I'm less likely to maintain my usual calm dignified repose. As a side note, I learned that woodlined lakefronts are perfectly designed to echo screams back and forth for annoyingly long periods.

There were also a gazillion huge old bullfrogs all along the lakeshore, and if you looked down into the water you would find dozens of little tadpoles, and quite a few that were not so little. They seemed to be in all the various steps of Darwinian development, from the tiny, black blobs with tails, to the mottled green blobs the size of an apricot with rudimentary eyes and a couple with half-baked feet. I'd seen the very immature black blob ones before, but I'd never actually seen a half-evolved frog in person before - only in pictures.

Then there was the evening animal interlude. Jennifer had warned me to keep our cabin door closed at dusk to keep from attracting unwanted visitors. We were good about it, but evidently the prior occupants were not. That first evening after we had finished up dinner and were all playing cards (progressive rummy!) -- all of a sudden a levitating rat of considerable size materialized and began flapping and flopping drunkenly in circles through the living room. Chaos ensued among my less stalwart family members. With typical grace and calm I managed to take control of the situation, deftly and fearlessly cornering and shooing the airborne rodent from the cabin.

[UPDATE: Stacy has informed me she will divorce me if I don't set the record straight.]

OK, maybe stalwart is a word that implies a little more than is warranted. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn't exactly as calm as might be inferred from the narrative above. Alright, it is conceivable that others might have misinterpreted my calm voice and well-ordered directions as being, well, maybe not so calm or well-ordered.

[ANOTHER UPDATE: Stacy just made a pantomime of removing her wedding ring.]

OK! OK! So I screamed like a girl and dove under the table. Stacy had to swoop the bat out of the cabin with her own jacket. (Are you happy!?!)

On the bright side I came to realize that the lakeshore is even good at echoing screams made from within well-closed up cabins.

The Great Adventure - Day 5 - August 9, 2009

We started out the fine Sunday morning by literally enjoying the fruits of our Saturday labors: blueberry pancakes! For some reason I had been getting up really early even with the three hour time change, so I was up by myself for a couple of hours. By the time the rest of the sleep-stunted crew descended to the kitchen the pancakes were done; there were few complaints or objections.



My parents go to the Stetson Memorial Methodist Church in Patten. Their old pastor had left several months ago and the new pastor they had called had just moved up with his family a couple of weeks ago. They are a young couple with a son who was about two or three and a daughter that was born right when they arrived. I was looking forward to hearing him preach. The service turned out to be atypical, which, ironically, seems to be how most services at that church go. (For some reason every time we're in town the church has something funky going on the week we're there. My Mom assures me that they do have regular church most weeks.) This week, in keeping with the camaraderie of Pioneer Days, the church held a joint service in the park with the Pentecostal church. The park has a little gazebo where they set up instruments for the praise band and a mic for the preachers, and they set out a hundred or so folding chairs on the lawn for the two churches. Not being a regular, I have no idea how much the congregations mixed it up. It turned out to be a scorcher, so it was a little amusing to watch as one-by-one, everyone picked up their folding chair and retreated to the shade of the one tree in the park, about forty feet from the pavilion. Pretty soon the preachers were shouting across forty feet of open lawn to the huddled masses elbowing for scraps of branch shade. I had a feeling they were looking to have a long, drawn out service with beau coup praise songs and testimonials, but as all the little-old-ladies of the congregation retreated for the shade tree and all the stalwart logger/farmers trying to stick it out in the sun started looking faint, I suspect they curtailed the event considerably. We did get to hear my folks pastor preach for a bit, and I was a little shocked and pleased to hear him 1) quote St. Augustine ("Love God and do what you will.") and 2) correctly interpret and apply it. Though unquestionably commendable on community, deep theological digs have not been a hallmark of that church in my experience.

After church we devoted ourselves to what Sunday afternoons are meant for: power naps. But these were not lazy, undisciplined, purposeless naps. These were targeted naps executed to a specific purpose, anticipating a higher calling. We would need our rest in order to be in top form to hit Mattawamkeag Lake in Grampy's boat with our rods and reels later that afternoon!

An hour or so before we were to go, Grampy grabbed a pitchfork and called L and N out into the backyard for a ritual I knew well, but wasn't sure sheltered L and N would handle - the digging of the bait. As a boy I remember digging for nightcrawlers with my Dad and brother. I enjoyed that as much as the actual fishing - maybe more. I've never found earthworms to be gross or disgusting, and always enjoyed holding them and the semi-tickle they gave as they wiggled around in the palm of my hand. I know we've found worms in our California garden and they've been things of interest, but I wasn't sure how L and N would handle being asked to get in among the dirt clods and gently extract them.
I shouldn't have worried, but rather considered the event in the same light L and N did - another opportunity to get completely dirty. We had soon collected a couple of cans full, along with lots of leaves and sticks thoughtfully included by N in case they got hungry. I'm not sure I went into too much detail about why we were collecting the worms, and thought I'd let that bridge-crossing occur when we got there.

Gotta love GoogleEarth!

Most of our Maine trips as a kid centered around going "out to camp." My grandfather owned a pretty nice little camp out on Mattawamkeag Lake and we'd all go out there and spend the week. The lake is rugged and beautiful. It's not a great swimming lake - lots of mud and muck and things that go slither in the night, but it’s great for canoeing and fishing, and a prime spot for seeing moose and loons. We would spend all day either on the lake with Dad and Grampy or else scrambling over all the enormous boulders that lined the lakeshore with my brother and sisters and any other cousins that happened to be around at the time. As my grandfather got older he couldn't keep it up anymore and none of the kids had an interest in taking it over, so the camp was sold. I've been out there a couple of times since, just to walk around the property and down to the lake. (I've never run into the new owners.) It's always a little sad to walk around our camp that isn't our camp anymore. My Dad still owns a camp lot a little ways down the road, but he never actually built a camp on it. I doubt he ever will.

Fishermen at the ready.

There are a couple of other good-sized lakes in the vicinity, but we all know and love Mattawamkeag, so that's where we always go boating and fishing. Two bodies of water, the Upper Lake and Lower Lake are connected by a thin, reedy channel called the Thorofare. Grampy's camp (my Grampy, not L and N's) was on the Thorofare. We tended to go down to the considerably larger Lower Lake when we'd go fishing. It was further from the road that nicked the north coast of the Upper Lake, so it seemed all the more remote and campy. The only public boat launch, however, is on the Upper Lake, so we put in there and made our way south through the Thorofare, passed my Grampy's old camp and out onto the Lower Lake. L and I rode up in the front of the boat, Grampy and N sat midships, and Mimi and Stacy sat aft, keeping the motor in the water.







Stacy and I needed fishing licenses to fish, and considering we would be out there probably no more than that one afternoon, couldn't justify the expense of the out-of-state rates. Mimi and Grampy had their resident licenses and L and N were both still young enough to fish without one, so Stace and I were quite literally just along for the ride, and to perhaps bait a hook or two - a task that prompted no end of questions from L. ("Daddy, is the worm crying? Does the worm like the hook? Daddy, why is it wiggling around. Is that blood?") Our fisherman's prayers were unusually humble: we wanted a couple of bites all around, one fish, preferably very small, on each line, and certainly not much more than that. Nobody really wanted the fish to be biting such that we had to bring home a kettle of fish, and we would have been in deep doo-doo if someone, especially L or N, actually snagged something with some life to it, given their $4 Barbie and Superman fishing poles secured at that high-end backwoods outfitter, Target. I could just imagine a big bass or pickerel hitting N's line and watching the little red rod soar out of the boat and down the lake to the wailing miseries of its former half-hearted holder.

Our prayers were answered to the first order. L's worm was barely on the hook (with many tender admonitions on L's part) and in the water when her pole got giggly and she was instructed to reel in. A small white perch, barely big enough to keep, but big enough to meet a five-year-olds imagination and expectations. Mimi followed quickly with one of her own. N was not out done - his little white perch was adorable, but too small, so back in the lake he went. We moved around here and there on the Lower Lake, and then moved back into the Thorofare and fished off the reeds for a while. An hour or two went by with just enough activity to keep the natives from getting restless. The final count: L - two white perch (1 keeper, 1 throw-back), N - one white perch, one yellow perch, and one sunfish, all returned to their watery homeland. Mimi caught one white perch worth keeping and a couple of worthless sunfish, which she preferred, since she'd rather catch-and-release anyway.

As the sun began to go down we pulled anchor and headed back up the Thorofare, past the old Perkins Camp and on across the Upper Lake. It was cold and the white noise of the outboard motor surprisingly made the world seem quiet. The trees were darkening on the shore and the reeds that tossed back and forth in our wake seemed to be waving lazily goodbye. An occasional cold fleck of spray made it over the bow and into our faces. It was just like a hundred other boat rides home as a kid and I felt like I was unpacking a pressed and folded memory and letting my wife and kids try it on for a while.

Grampy's old camp. The
boulders look so small now.

I know the kids won't grow up on that lake, and they probably won't even remember much of the details of this particular trip, but I will and it gives me some small, inexplicable level of quiet joy that I could pass that memory around.