This is the second in a series of articles by Staff Writer Chuck Haga, who is retracing the route taken by author John Steinbeck in 1960 that led to the book “Travels With Charley.”
It was shaping up to be “the secretest election we ever had,” John Steinbeck decided as he wandered through New England in the fall of 1960.
“I do hope I can find some opinion somewhere,” he wrote to his wife as he left Maine and headed west. “The Down Easters don’t give out much if they don’t know you.”
Steinbeck never talked to the likes of Maine potato farmer Arnold Roach.
“Those idiot ding-a-lings in the Reagan administration have just about put us out of business,” Roach said. “Any farmer who would vote for any Republican for any office should be put in a mental institution.”
And then there’s Bangor real estate developer Richard Trott.
“I get down on my knees every night and pray that George Bush is elected president,” he said. “The whole family does.”
So much for tight-lipped Yankees.
And if Gloria Curtis is less outspoken, it’s because the presidential election just isn’t what’s important right now. What’s important now is killing a bear.
She killed one last season and one the season before, and she’s looking for her third in the woods around Portage Lake in the far northern part of Maine that juts deep into Canada.
She talks about her bear with calm assurance. She’ll bait it with scrap french fries and molasses, wait on it for days in cold drizzle if she has to, shoot it, dress it out and can most of the meat for winter stew. The money she gets for the hide will help pay household bills, and that’s part of what makes Maine home and life good.
She is less sure about the election.
“Neither one of them looks that good to me right now,” she said. “I’m hoping that before the last moment one of them will make sense.”
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Ask them, and New Englanders will tell you what they like or, more often, don’t like about the men who would be president. But leave them to their own conversations and they are likelier to talk about the price of potatoes, the stench of paper mills or whether the Red Sox can hold off the Yankees.
But that is as it always has been. More than 100 years ago, the British statesman and writer James Bryce came to America to examine our political habits and institutions. He marveled at the rambunctiousness of our politics, but he also found us peculiarly preoccupied with other matters even as we prepared to pick a leader.
He wrote: “Even now, business matters so occupy the mind of the financial and commercial classes. and athletic competitions the minds of the uneducated classes and of the younger sort in all classes, that political questions are apt, except at critical moments, to fall into the background.”
For some people, the choice between Michael Dukakis and George Bush will be a matter of habit, tradition. “This is a Democratic town, a union town,” said Darren Evasius, 19, of Monson, Mass., explaining why he’ll vote for Dukakis. But down the road a few miles, a pickup flashes by with another young man at the wheel. The truck has Massachusetts plates and a new bumper sticker: “No Dukes.”
People are bothered by the style of both campaigners. Nancy Remar of Connecticut, playing with her daughter in a New Hampshire campground, said both Bush and Dukakis have been mean. “I don’t like either of their attitudes, the way they go at each other all the time. I know that’s politics, but I hate that part of it.”
She works in an emergency shelter in Hartford, teaching children. Her husband, Mike, is a computer programmer. They brought I-year-old Stephanie into the woods for a long weekend, and Stephanie liked it so much she shrieked above the jays and the squirrels.
The Remars will vote for Bush. For them, the only issue that matters is abortion. “I was always a Democrat when I was growing up.” she said. “But it was easy to vote for Ronald Reagan. It’s easy when you listen and he talks about what you care about, and he says, ‘I’ll help you.’ And now George Bush will continue that.”
In Amherst, Mass., where Emily Dickinson lived alone and wrote poetry that celebrated isolation from society as the way to grace, Sara Mierke sat in a grassy park and studied cross-cultural anthropology. She wore it, too: a purple African smock, brass leaf earrings and a deep tan, all acquired on a summer study trip to Kenya.
She is 22, a senior at Amherst College. This was her second visit to Africa. She spent 10 months there last year.
“The Africans asked who I was going to vote for, and when I said Dukakis they were surprised,” she said. “They’re taken with Reagan’s image.
“But when I was in Africa the first time, I started thinking more about what I didn’t know about my own country. When I came back, I read more, got involved more. And what I learned was that we have our own Third World right here, and it’s getting worse.”
She believes Africa and America can be better, will be better.
“I went through a fairly typical stage of cynicism, when I thought it didn’t matter what people did, what I did. But I have a pretty strong faith now in human intelligence, in the ability to overcome problems.
“I see a lot of community concern among my friends. There’s more understanding of how our society affects others. And it’s just a real burden to be negative. It’s not very productive.
“In Kenya this summer, I was with people, mostly in their early 30s, who feel fairly positive – even though where they’re working is really primitive and difficult. They recognize the limitations of their personal impact, but also the value of it.”
She laughed, self-conscious about making a speech.
For 50 cents, I bought a paperback edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems at one of the college bookstores and took it into the garden at the poet’s home, now a national shrine. Giant oaks and hedges shelter the garden some, and it’s a nice place to read or to think about isolation, or Africa, or bees and lilacs.
But it’s a busy street that goes by the house, a reminder of routes and schedules.
I drove north toward Vermont, through country that encourages contemplation or just looking. Homes have porches, and porches many windows, and there are benches of wood or stone facing meadows and other vistas.
That hasn’t changed since 1960.
Steinbeck would recognize that. He would know the huge, bright-red barns that are called the cathedrals of Vermont, too. But what would he think of the condominiums, stacked and angled off hillsides, built for the view and now part of it?
From the eastern edge of the Green Mountains, the road is east and north through the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
There is commerce in the countryside: mums on the honor system, apples and peaches and corn, and everywhere the antique shops, just as Steinbeck found them, “bulging with authentic and attested trash from an earlier time.”
Supper in the woods: Vermont cheese, green with sage, “the cheese the moon is made of,” plus Massachusetts tomatoes and sweet corn, dark rye bread from the Black Sheep Bakery in Amherst, and dry McIntosh apple wine, chilled by night air that reached eventually to 38 degrees. Maybe the guests at the Four-In-Hand Country Inn down the road ate better. Maybe.
New Hampshire is where people know who Franklin Pierce was because he was born there. His statue stands outside the State Capitol in Concord. There’s a statue of Daniel Webster, too. He was a senator from Massachusetts, but he was born in New Hampshire.
“It’s a good place to meet people,” said Fred MacAdam. He was there beneath Webster with his wife, Jolene Benoit, and their son, Eliot. It was Eliot’s fifth birthday, and they were waiting for grandparents.
They are of a type common in New England, aging hippies or former activists who wanted to get close to the land, who still want to save the world but figure they’ll do it a town at a time. Sometimes they make common cause with the older stock Yankees, the cautious skeptics who keep state and local government as spare as the federal government will let them.
MacAdam works in historic preservation, not to yuppify neighborhoods but to preserve architecture that encouraged a simpler life style. “The lowest common denominator in building is what prevails,” he said. “Most of New England was built around carriages and farms. Now we have automobiles, and the autos are ruining what once were quiet and beautiful country neighborhoods.”
Benoit is an environmental consultant – to farmers. She encourages them to raise crops without chemicals, and she talks to them about acid rain. “If you don’t start with your neighborhoods and your communities, and strengthen them, what’s going to happen to us?”
MacAdam pressed Eliot’s hand into the letters of Webster’s name on the statue and helped him sound them out.
“We’ve tried to raise him well,” Benoit said. “We try to do everything consciously, honestly, to pass along the right values.
“I’m optimistic because I see that people in their hearts know that this Earth is in big trouble. But it’s hard when you see that so many marriages fail today. What will save the world is the family.”
The Rev. Earle R. Custer had much the same message during Sunday services at the United Methodist Church in Conway, N.H., just shy of the Maine border. The advertised sermon was “Love Your Neighbor – Carefully,” but it was tamer than that.
“There are times when the loving thing is to wait and be quiet,” he said. “But sometimes the loving thing is to be strong and intervene with the person you love. Loving is more than feeling good about someone.”
The opening hymn was one of praise “for the beauty of the world,” and it was a good day for it in Conway, crisp and bright. In a football field over the tracks from the church, a high school band practiced “La Bamba,” playing it as a fox trot.
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Maine. The back roads to Deer Isle off the southern coast are marked by the signs of people needing to supplement their incomes: blueberries for sale, wooden toys, mulch hay, piano tuning, Hilda’s pies.
No, it is not possible to drive past a sign that says Hilda’s pies.
It was Bob Deans, 80 and Hilda’s husband, who was minding the pie shed. He spoke with authority on blueberry pies, how they should look and smell and taste, how the very best have juice running out the crust.
Besides pies, health is what matters to him these days, he said. He has beaten cancer. “Made 35 trips into Bangor for the radiation. They say it’s gone.” But he’s suffering from something else now, something with a name he can’t pronounce, so he has it written in pencil on a scrap of paper in his wallet: peripheral nedropathy. What it means, he said, is that he can’t walk or hold things as well as when he worked at the paper mill in Bucksport.
“The election? God, I don’t know. I think they’re all half-crazy. But I don’t say much. I don’t know much.”
What’s the most important issue facing the country?
“Why, I believe it’s poverty. You see more of it here now. It’s not enough to have a job anymore. A man, working, with a family, he gets $3.65 an hour. I don’t see how he makes a show, do you?”
Down the road a few miles is the broadest, prettiest, richest blueberry patch I have ever seen, no doubt the source of Hilda’s wealth. And more signs: baled hay, wooden decoys.
Trott, the Bangor real estate developer, was on a stopover at Stonington, on Deer Isle, to put his sailboat up for the season. He was taking it to Camden, to the south. “That’s where the pleasure craft are,” he said. “This is still a working harbor. The fishing boats go out of here, the lobsters come in, and there’s a cannery here.”
They are two faces of Maine, the harbor at Camden and the harbor at Stonington, two outlooks if not classes. The residents of Stonington approved a moratorium recently on harbor development, to restrict pleasure craft. That’s part of a broader resistance to development, and it bothers Trott.
“It was a coalition of the locals who don’t want to lose their fishing harbor and the new people, the out-of-staters who have their piece and now don’t want to see any more development.
“People have come up here from Massachusetts, New Jersey, and they buy property. Then they don’t want any more people. ‘Gee, what happened in Jersey could happen here,’ they say. ‘We have to close it off.’
“But this is a big state. Maine is bigger than the rest of New England put together, and there’s still only about a million people. Some of these people here have been poor all their lives, and now they’ve got some land that’s starting to be worth something.”
Up north, in the wooded lake country away from the ocean, Steve Geno talked about the influx of “flatlanders,” the people from southern New England who have discovered Maine.
“They move in here because they like it here,” he said. “They like how cheap it is. Then they get involved in town government and they start changing everything around to how it was where they left. They want better roads, better schools. But people here want to take things easy.”
Unemployment in New England ranged in July from 2.3 percent in Vermont, lowest in the nation, to 4.7 percent in Maine, still below the national figure of 5.5 percent. But in Aroostook County, it was 6.7 percent.
Parts of the county have an Appalachian look, people living in old mobile homes or small, one-level sheds with makeshift siding and shingling and lean-to garages. Wash hangs from porch lines, and in nearly every yard there’s a winter’s worth of cut wood. These simple, unpainted homes are set off by the occasional smart, new log cabin, too perfectly rustic, too self-consciously neat.
This is potato country, with about 85,000 acres planted to the crop. Last year’s harvest: 24 million hundredweight. (In Minnesota, farmers produced 16.3 million hundredweight last year on 72,000 acres.)
Some of the surface plants are still green, but some of the fields are brown, ready for harvest.
“It’s a good crop,” said Roach, the potato farmer, and the price is up — thanks in part to the drought’s effect on Red River Valley producers. But that hasn’t diminished the anger Roach feels about Reagan administration trade agreements with the Canadians.
“The Canadians have been devastating us,” he said. “With all their subsidies, you can’t lose growing potatoes in Canada, and they’re dumping them here.”
Roach, 60, farms 400 acres, half in potatoes and half oats. Twenty years ago, he had one of 4,000 farms in the county. “Now we’re down to around 800. We lost 1,000 or 1,200 in the last eight years.
“No sir, I wouldn’t vote for a Republican for dogcatcher.”
At the top of Maine, from a hill above Soldier Pond, the wilderness seems endless. But Gloria Curtis, the bear hunter, had said it isn’t. There are more bears now because there’s no spring hunting season, so winter-born cubs get a summer to learn survival skills from their mothers. The take last year was 2,394 bears, a record. (In Minnesota, hunters tagged 1,577 bears in 1987, also a state record.)
“But it’s not as big a wilderness as it was before,” Curtis said. “There’s so many roads now. People have so much more access to the woods without having to worry about getting lost.”
Still, from above the pond, the green of the forest seemed to stretch forever on a soft, drizzly, calm day. For a long time it was perfectly quiet. then from a few miles into the woods came the sharp report of a high-powered rifle, and then it was quiet again.