Introduction to The Quotable Moose
The map explains a lot. In contrast to the rest of the New England states, Maine is big--almost big enough to contain the collective land mass of all the others. It takes as long to get from the coastal city of Portland to the northern town of Fort Kent, as to travel from Portland to New York City. If Maine's twisted and knotted coastline were unraveled, it would be 3,500 miles long.
On the map the states around Maine show a tangle of superhighways; neighboring New Hampshire alone is crossed by three of them. Maine has only one, route 95, which, dangling its small adjunct 495, traverses the entire state from Kittery to Houlton. Otherwise, there are three primary roads--routes 1 along the coast, 2 across the state's mid-section, and 201 going straight up into Canada--and then an assortment of spiderlegs, the more tenuous ones reaching toward the north.
All the rest is not-roads--enough white space to recall that even after Maine was granted statehood in 1820, a large section of the state was still considered part of the American frontier. Even today, four-fifths of Maine is covered with forests. Together with its lakes (approximately 2,200), rivers and streams (more than 5,000), those forests possess wildlife of all kinds, more abundant by far than may be found in the other New England states. It was the sense of Maine as a wild territory beyond the reach of civilization that brought the first white settlers here, many of them renegades seeking escape from the confinements of life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Later, Maine's wildness inspired a literature and art of exploration, attracting writers like Thoreau and painters like Church and Lane to the state's less settled locations.
The tradition of journeying into the unknowns of Maine continues in this reader. In poems, short stories and essays, writers or their characters
travel on foot, by car, on skis, in boats or canoes, making their discoveries about the territory and sometimes the self as they undertake or recall their hikes, drives and voyages. The truth is that even though an entire section of the book has been devoted to Maine travels ("Travelers' Advisories"), journeys of one kind or another take place throughout The Quotable Moose. There is no more characteristic theme in the contemporary literature of Maine than the theme of the journey.
When they write about the settled life, writers in Maine tend to concentrate on villages and towns--a fact not so remarkable in a rural state whose biggest cities are by American standards more like big towns in their size. Large urban centers happen where there is modern industry; in this state, supported mostly by tourism, the primary industries of fishing, farming, lumbering and paper manufacturing go back to the last century. Cut off from economic change and slow to adopt the urban styles more common elsewhere in New England, Maine's towns and their people offer writers sources that are increasingly unique: regional values and folkways, pockets of ethnic tradition, traces of dialect still untouched by the middle-American speech of radio and TV. Authors in The Quotable Moose have made use of such sources, citing also a certain sort of hybrid, a cross between the old and the new, which Maine's slow change has wrought. One writer, for instance, refers to "an old monster highway maintenance garage converted into an eating place"; another speaks of "puckerbrush suburbs." A third, determining that the illicit affair is urban in its origin, describes a Maine version which takes place at a Grange Hall dance "with your head up against a splintery upright...while wearing a thermal undershirt, while holding a can of beer stiffly, politely off to one side during the kiss."
However the characters we find in this volume may be carrying on, whether their stories are comic, sorrowful or uplifting, what most typifies them is that they appear to us in the context of knowable communities or families, and place. Is this why they seem in general so sympathetic, eccentric and vivid? In any case, they have an authority that distinguishes them from their counterparts in much postmodernist literature.
If the period style of today's literature calls for irony and skepticism rather than belief, the work that appears at the end of The Quotable Moose represents still another departure from contemporary writing. There, Maine authors often turn to themes of affirmation. Little wonder that the natural surroundings of the state influence them as they do so. For Maine's geography includes, in all seasons, mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, meadows and seacoast in combinations as various and beautiful as one could find anywhere. The spiritual and sometimes ecstatic writing that geography has inspired is among the most moving of the book, offering a last, lovely glimpse into the meaning of the map.
And how has the book's writing, on which Maine has had such an impact, been organized? As has been hinted, the units of The Quotable Moose underscore themes that the Maine map has helped to create. So sections of the reader relate to journeys, community life, and nature-visions. But the sections have also been chosen and arranged to lead the reader step by step into the realities of Maine. The reader enters the volume, in part one, through the "arrivals" of assorted Maine people and creatures. Richard Gillman opens the section with his poem, "Together among Monarchs." Coming upon a field of monarchs which have themselves just arrived, he and his father experience an uplifting of spirit that matches the flight of the butterflies they observe. Later on, a poem by William Carpenter traces the remarkable transformation of Bucksport, Maine when it receives the unlikely visit of Equadorian sailors, and a Franklin Burroughs essay offers the compelling portrait of a hunter who introduces his small-town neighbors to a freshly killed moose he has hung in his garage. In his essay "Into Woods," Bill Roorbach arrives in the town of Farmington where, after a checkered history of work as a tradesman, he sets out to renovate an old house, assisted by the father who first got him "into woods." Just behind the feisty humor of the piece are the complexities of Roorbach's relationship with his father and the affection he feels for him.
Nor do the section's arrivals occur only in the towns of Maine. In Jacqueline Fuller's spirited short story "Cecile's Dog, Bo," we find ourselves in one of the state's few cities. There, Maureen, an ex-Floridian, is initiated into the life of Maine by her Franco roommate Cecile, who also introduces Maureen to her unpredictable dog and her confused love-life. Edward Holmes' "Blitzkrieg and the Nautical Plow" takes us to an island on the Maine coast. In its dryly humorous, Down East style, Holmes' essay shows what happens when farmers hitch a savvy horse newly imported from the mainland to a plow made with seagoing equipment.
It is not difficult to find winter, Maine's longest season, in this reader. Winter appears in all four of the book's sections, never more menacingly than in "The Bird Feeder," a narrative poem by Robert Chute that appears in section two. The readings of this unit, "Travelers' Advisories," present a wide assortment of journeys, all of which extend our awareness of the state and its people, and some of which reveal the underside of Maine life. Baron Wormser's disturbing verse "Somerset County," like the Chute poem, fits the latter category, associating the fatal accident of a truck-driver with the hard realities of life in one of Maine's poorest counties. Fatal accidents are the theme in Amy Clampitt's poem "Handed Down" as well, in which fisherfolk on the coast of Maine repeat stories that feature--"the names/ of the dead, kept alive, they still hold onto."
Other readings in the section concern journeys that are less worrisome. To take the trip Robert Kimber writes about in "No Night Life"--from Allagash Village in northern Maine all the way south to Temple--one only need consider how much gas there is in the car, and how to appreciate "the real life of the night". In "Maine Eats," the journey is culinary; by following the intriguing directions of the essay's guide, John Thorne, the traveler will discover some of the state's best vernacular restaurants, and the true flavor of Maine besides. The issue of eating comes up once more in Richard Aldridge's verse recollection, "Which Frightened Both the Heroes So," where the poet's uncle accidentally drives off the road into a field carrying two passengers, Aldridge and his aunt. The poem's unpredicted and charming conclusion, which involves a sandwich, a sunset, and holding hands, is best left to the enjoyment of the reader.
Each of the first two sections of The Quotable Moose hints at what sort of people live, and have lived, in Maine. The third section, the reader's longest, gives the subject full play. Cathie Pelletier's short story "Civil Defense," about a family in northern Maine in the 1950's, shows a grandmother's struggle with the prospect of being placed in an old folks' home, and the impact of that struggle on her granddaughter, Mandy, Pelletier's central character. Ironically, the civil defense shelter Mandy's father plans throughout the piece offers no refuge from the dark insights that come to her at the story's end. In her essay ""Cold Spring Nights in Maine, Smelts, and the Language of Love," Alice Bloom's topic is not family but neighbors, whose ways she, being "from away," attempts to understand. Beginning with questions about a smelting expedition ("What rush of blood or signal do they obey, and how do they know it?"), Bloom goes on to probe the frustrating sufficiency of her new friend Hilde, and finally, the submerged emotional life of country men in Maine, who, even when they seem most extroverted, conceal the "larger creek of their deeper feelings."
Urban neighbors are portrayed in poems by Betsy Sholl and Kenneth Rosen. Sholl's "Bird Lady" is a lively dramatic monologue that presents the eccentric character of a street person in Portland. Rosen's "Stormy Night" depicts a speaker who is compelled to assist a ragged group of ethnics trying to free their car from snow, though they trouble and repel him. By placing us close to their action, both poems force us to consider our own attitudes toward people outside of society's mainstream. "Wish," by Monica Wood, a short story set in a mill town, introduces still another distressing neighbor, who upsets the family of the narrator by the serious neglect of his dog. However, in the story's complex and moving climax, where the family's father, long ill, dies and the neighbor's attitude is altered, we are uplifted by a love that transforms grief and includes all creatures.
What do we learn about the Maine character from the people gathered in section three? If we are to be guided by Elaine Ford's story "Bent Reeds," in which a falling out between two old Down-Easters is retold by a third of the same kind, Mainers tend to be proud, guarded in their feelings, and independent to a fault. Yet Mainers also include the ethnics of Kenneth Rosen's poem--as different from Down-Easters as are the Francos whose ritual of the wake A. Poulin, Jr. touches on in his verse, "The Front Parlor." Such selections indicate that one must be careful not to stereotype the people of Maine, who are finally too diverse for simple characterizations.
The state of mind inspired by the state is similarly hard to define, varying, as it does, according to who is inspired, and when, and where. Readings in the anthology's last section, "A State of Mind," suggest the range of interpretations and visions Maine has elicited from her writers. In the fiction of the section, the visions belong to characters. There is Robley Wilson's aging believer, Lyle Kennett, under such stress as a defender of the sea's creatures that his view of the ocean includes colors "he [has] never seen"; and there is Patricia O'Donnell's dreamy and troubled protagonist Albert Moss, so obsessed with the teachings of Wilhelm Reich that he leaves his family to travel from Maine to the West, just as Reich did 36 years before.
When the essayists of the last section write of Maine's meaning, they speak with considerable passion. To Carolyn Chute, in "The Other Maine," the true state, now being corrupted by developers and the tourist bureau in Augusta, is a place where a person has the freedom to be herself, without putting on "fifty layers of makeup" and her "best leather skirt"--where people can have "useful stuff around our yards," such as "tractor parts, truck tires," and "rolled up chicken wire." Richard Peek, whose essay "Piles" advocates the "family tradition" of a pile in the yard containing assorted "widgets," would agree with at least part of Chute's description.
For the more lyrical and suggestive disclosures and visions about Maine, one must turn to poetry, the genre that dominates the final section. Behaving like New England's earliest writers of verse, the poets collected here turn to nature for their meanings--for instance, to the peculiar quality of light which "catches the stones" in Robert Creeley's tiny lyric, "Waldoboro Eve"; or to the clarity of a certain night that leads us, in Gary Lawless' "Some Clear Night," out to a cove to learn "the true names of the stars." Like Lawless, many of the section's poets make us aware that the real world, in all its mystery and wonder, exists outside of the names we have given it. The signs of that world in "Ghosts, Balloons, Some Martians," by Kate Barnes, are "sparks from fireflies" that frighten a visiting Irish girl--who, significantly, does not know how to name them. Another sign, revealed in George Garrett's "How It Is, How It Was, How It Will Be," is the brilliance of snow, so various in its shining that the poet cannot find the one word to describe it. For Philip Booth in "Presence," where the world is once again a mysterious place "we try to make sense of," the more compelling mystery is "that we are here, here at all, still bearing with,/ and borne by" that world. If one has the feeling in "Presense" of a poet stammering toward truth, of a syntax stretching to take all the wonder in, so much more does one value the vision Booth presents.
I am grateful for such a poem, and grateful for all the writings gathered here, which take us--through arrivals, journeys, communal relations, and inspired states of mind--into the life and inner life of Maine, showing how universal the local ultimately is. To the authors of this splendid work I extend thanks not only for writing it in the first place, but for helping me obtain permission when necessary to reprint it. For her occasional help in checking my responses to submitted manuscripts, I thank my wife Diane, always my most trusted reader; and for their work in computer scanning, thanks go to Mal Carey and particularly to Mike Kelleher of the Computer Center at the University of Maine at Farmington. I am grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy, and to the University of Maine at Farmington for a sabbatical leave--both of which contributed to the completion of this reader. Finally, I offer thanks to Roy Zarucchi and Carolyn Page of Nightshade Press for their assistance. They are the ones, after all, who first saw the need for a contemporary Maine reader. Without their idea, the literary feast contained in these pages could never have been served.
Wesley McNair
Mercer, Maine
August, 1993
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