Upta Maine
Posted: Thursday, May 07, 2009
by Cliff Gallant
My father grew up in the 1930's Depression years in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a working class suburb of Boston best known as the boyhood home of Horatio Alger, the author of the nineteenth -century dime novel series Pluck 'n Luck, in which the virtues of good ol' American get up n' go were celebrated through the valiant efforts of never-say-die boy heros.
Well, all that stuff that those boys had been collecting came in handy when the 1940's arrived and there developed a need for tanks and airplanes and such. The new decade also offered expanded travel opportunities, and my father and a lot of other young men suddenly became aware of a much wider world. When the big adventure ended though, they went home to those same cities and those same streets.
Now the question became what to do with yourself now that you were grown and had been around a good deal. My father, now married to my mother and with me on the way, turned his attention to serious pursuits, opening up an auto repair shop with a small junkyard off to the side.
That enterprise bobbed along quite well for a few years because nearly everyone had a car during those boom times and, fortunately, they broke down a good deal more often than they do now. Better yet, they eventually died and had to be scrapped. Everything chnaged, though, on that eventful day when a guy my father knew mentioned that he had just returned from Maine and knew of a repair shop up there wtih a bunch of junk cars sitting behind it that could be had for a song. My father didn't quite know where Maine was, or how far one would have to motor to get there, but get there he would. I'm not sure if it's one of those things we conjure up in our mind's eye or not, but i seem to remember my father and the guy standing in front of my father's garage and the guy is pointing towards Maine and my father is looking wispfully in that direction . But, like I say, that might be imagined, I was only seven at the time so the menmory has had a lot of time to get built between then and now.
In any case, something called the Maine Turnpike had just been opened and my father was directed to take a particular exit about a hundred miles up the "pike" and was assured that the garage and junk cars were just a few meandering miles from there. So he jumped ino his truck one morning and was off. He made it to the appropriate exit in short order, that part of the trip being pretty much of a straight line where one could make" good time" , but he found himself slowing down and looking about wide-eyed as he motored through the Maine countryside. He was in awe of what he was seeing. Trees, trees everywhere, with an occasional house set back from the road, a place and a way of life unlike what he had ever known. What truly captivated him, though, were the large open fields, which might have conjured up bucolic scenes of cows and gazing sheep for others - but for him brught forth visions of a vast ever-expanding ... junkyard.
My father located the repair shop and, yes, there were junk cars were sitting in the field out back as promised, but more than that, glory be, the whole operation was up for sale. The Sierra Nevadas had been crossed and my father stood misty eyed, gazing at his future.
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When he got home my father had to run the idea of moving to Maine by my mother, of course, but in those days the woman of the house didn't play nearly the part in family decisions that she does now, so he didn't have to edge around the subject quite as much as a man might have to today. His broaching of the subject to her went something like: " Get everything packed. We're moving upta Maine."
My mother had not ventured away from familiar city streets in her life , and I clearly remember her telling someone we were moving to " some god-forsaked barren waste called Maine" , so that would indicate that she wasn't as enthused about the move as my father was. In any event, she did the aforementioned packing and we were off.
Well, we got up to Maine and got settled without too much of a problem because, conveniently enough, a house came with the garage and junkyard. At some point my mother had ventured to ask about where the family was going to live, possibly as a way of making conversation on the trip, and my father voluntered that, yes indeed, a good sized house was part of the deal. That worked out well because there were four of us children by the time.
Living in rural Maine was something of an adjustment for my family. We hadn't known life without a lot of neighbors and realtives nearby. In our new home in Maine there was a little country store " a coupl'a miles up the road" , and while there turned out to be a few neighbors within reasonable distance of our house, they raised chickens or cut down trees for a living. Hitherto all we'd known about their kind of life was what we had learned from stories told by my father's father, who had migrated to Massachusetts from a farm in Prince Edward Island in the 1920's when he was a young amn and nmy father was a child.
It wasn't long before we got wrapped up in our new lives though. Some of the neighbors' houses contained kids, and that 's all it takes for kids to take an interest in their surroundings; and even my mother managed some kind of adjustment. She was a warm hearted person with an endearing sense of humor and was interested in everything, and those quaities seemed to appeal to country peiople just as they had to city folk . In the beginning the neighbors had great fun chortling amongst themselves about things like the first time my mother experienced nightime without city lights and how she exclaimed that there were so many more stars in Maine then there are in Masssachusetts. It wasn't until they realized that most of that sort of thing had been her offering herself up for their entertainment that they came to better understand and appreciate her.
Of course my father and mother soon had stories of their own about our new neighbors to entertain peope from Massachusetts with when they came up to visit. There was the time a neighborcame to the garage to buy a new battery for his car but when he found out that my father's batteries cost most than one he could buy in Portland , a city some twenty miles away, he asked my father if he could borrow a battery to make the trip. Well, they might have been an unreasonable request for a customer to make, but how could you refuse a neighbor the use of something you had, weren't using, and he needed? I think my father lent the man a battery just so he could have the story to tell.
Most of the stories having to do with the way people are up in Maine, though, had to do with their wanting to trade my father for work he did on their vehicles rather than come up with the long green. We drank a lot of milk that came straight from a neighbor's cow, for instance. Trading a used transmission for milk was quite a hoot for visitors from Massachusetts for some reason. Then there was the time my father agreed to take two piglets as payment.
Raising pigs seemed pretty srtaight forward to somene like my father who had never done it. Have a place to keep them in, feed then regularly, wait until they've grown enough, then ship them off to have them made into good breakfast stuff. Not a lot to figure out. Certainly not on the order of doing an engine job on a V-8 or replacing the drive assembly of a Mack truck.
I think the idea of raising pigs was appealing to my father mostly because it gave him something to talk about with his father when we went to Massachusetts to visit. My grandfather didn't express much interest in my father's auto repair business but he always wanted to know how much the pigs had grown. Such is life that what appears to be something done on the side by someone might actually be very central to them and the importance of it goes unsaid and remains unknown by most.
Setting up accommodations for the pigs was no problem. The poeple who lived in the house before we did raised chickens and there was a fairly sizable chicken coup not far behind our house. My father was assured by the contingent of local guys who hung around the garage that all he had to do was partition off half of the chicked coop for th pigs and keep their feed in the other half. He did that by erecting an interior wall. The pigs weren't really slighted for space, though, because he also cut a hole in the outer wall that allowed them access to an outside pen he built for them, also on the advice of the biys down at the garage. That was nice for the family too, we thought, because the pigs were located only about twenty yards behind the house and it was fun to sit and watch them cavorting about in their pen.
As for feding the pigs, there was the grain that the guys recommended, but that tended to be costly, so, in response to my fathere's concerns about that, they had something to suggest that would supplement the grain and cut overall expenses. There was a bakery in Potland that always had day-old bread and pastry for sale cheap and pigs love day-old bread and pastries , the guys told my father. Another alternative food source in Portland was a dairy not far from the bakery where, they said, large barrels of day-old milk could be had for the taking. The combination of bakery products and milk was irrestible to pigs , my father was assured, and with that diet the pigs would not only grow big and fat in no time at all but would also be happy. Because my family hadn't quite drawn the disctinction between animals kept for food and animals kept for pets it meant something to us that the pigs would be happy.
Things came together really well because the salvage yard where my father brought his scrap metal was conveniently located near the bakery and dairy. When he brought a load of scrap metal to Portland all he had to do was swing by both places after he had unloaded and fill the empty truck with barrels of bread, pastries and milk. Worked out real slick, as I remember one of the guys down at the garage saying.
Raising pigs was going so well , in fact, that my father figured he'd venture further into farming and decided to raise some chickens. Might as well take advantage of the space that had become available in the pig's quarters now that he didn't have to store as much grain. The bread, pastries and milk could be left outside in the uncovered barrels they came in.
That latter detail, though, food being stored outside in uncovered barrels, was what led to trouble. Every wild animal in the region made its way to our backyard. Raccoons, ground hogs, rabbits, we got them all. But the animal we saw the most of was squirrels. Squirrels are like that. When there's a good food supply available they'll show up in great numbes and show no restraint. They're also , well, " squirrelly", meaning that they scamper about madly and get themselves into all sorts of predicaments.
This is not laughable, not fun to relate, but the unhappy fact is that a number of squirrels , tittering on the edge of the milk barrels to drink, fell into the barrels and drowned. That's sad enough in itself but added to it was that my father didn't always check the contents of the barrel before he tipped it over to pour the milk into the pigs' trough . A person just doesn't always know enough to check for squirrels in a situation like that . Anyway, that meant that the pigs became carnivorous . Pigs will go either way, you know. But once they've tasted meat that's their preference, by far.
Added to that alarming circumstance were couple of situations that developed with the chickens. The first was that my father learned that chickens don't naturally roost somewhere just because you set it up nice and inviting place for them. There are technigues for making them lay their eggs in a particular place that have developed over the ages that need to be employed , otherwise the chickens will lay their eggs anywhere they happen to be when they get the urge. So there were now eggs strewn in the grass all around the backyard. Which doesn't seem that bad until you realize what it's like when you don't find all the eggs and and one has been sitting there for a week or two and you step on it on a hot August afternoon. The whole area gets affected by that experience for days and days, it's that bad, and the experience stays with you for a long long time, quite literally.
The situation concerning the eggs was unpleasant, for sure, but not nearly as serious as the other problem that developed with the chickens though.
When my father got the chickens he made sure to get an equal number of roosters and hens, about seven each as I remember. One on one and forever, just the way the Catholic catechism he was brought up on says it should be. Now, anyone who knows anything about such things knows that one rooster will suffice for a whole barnyard of chickens. It might not be moral or fair but it's the way nature works and you've got to recognize it and go along with it or experience the consequences. The consequence of too many roosters, I can tell you, is that the roosters not only fight to the death among themselves but, in their frenzy, also take out any chickedn that happens to cross their path. So now they were savaged poultry strewn around the backyard intersperced with the rotten eggs. Add this to the casulties of the fierce competition among the wildlife for the goodies in the uncovered barrels and you have the picture.
The pigs, of course, seeing the promise of dramatically expanding their dietary horizons, became very desirous of getting out of their pen and into the backyard scene I've described. Pigs are smart, as you might have heard. What these two did, in this circumstance, was to trample the ground beneath their feet continuously, so that when it rained the whole pen turned into a great mass of mud. They then edged the mud with the sides of their bodies over to the fence of the pen and stepped over the fence with ease when the mud dried. They might not have planned it with all that much precision, I'll never know, but I do know that they got out of that pen pretty regularly after awhile.
And so it was that a cry periodically would be lifted which I can still hear so well: "Pigs are out! Pigs are out!" Which cry would bring my father and the guys who hung around the garage running to the scene in their greasy overalls. That was quite a sight. The first few times my father thought that calling out to the pigs in an admonishing voice, using the names he had given them , would make them feel ashamed and ungrateful for all that he'd done for them and make them troop with their heads lowered back to their pen. But no. Pigs aren't that well socialized. The effort to get them back where they belonged called for an excessive amount of yelling, frantic arm waving, and threatening with wrenches clutched in greasy hands. And then there were the rotten egg landmines ...
Well, there cam a fateful day when the pigs got out and an old farmer happened to be down at the garage. I remember him standing off to the side with his thumbs hooked into his suspenders looking calmly on as my father and the others did their thing, then saying in his slow and easy way: " Well-l-l lemme tell ya, the kind'a squealin' them pigs is doin' means jes one thing - theys afta meat. Ya kin tell'a diff'rence 'tween kind'sa pig squeals if ya know wha'cha listenin' fer, en' I kin tell ya them pigs is squealiin' fer meat, en' it don't matta ta them t'all if'n it's a chicken or a squirrel or a kid's leg they end up wit."
My mother heard him say it. That's what made the difference. She hadn't acted as a restraining influence or hindrance to my father to any degree at all up to theis point, but this piece of information changed that. She'd ignored the carnage and commotion and put up with the pig smell - we'd found out that there's a good reason that a pig pen is placed much further that twenty yards from the house - but this was it. She told my father that if he didn't ge rid of those damn pigs she and the kids would be on the next train or stagecoach or whatever contrivance there was that led back to Massachusetts. Evidently what she said and he way she said it, given that she had never said anything like it before, was enough to get his attention and in short order the pigs and even what was left of the chickens and roosters were gone.
Well, that was pretty much it for my father's farming ventures. Somehow the fun had gone out of it. But he was able to bring a big side of bacon down to my grandfather and I know they were both pleased by that. Sometimes little things mean everything, and as I think about it now I think my grandfather probably knew how hard my father had tried at raising animals, and I also think he had a pretty good idea of why he got into it in the first place.
My father never did put together a junkyard big enough to fill one of those large fields that so captured his imagination on his first visit, but he did put together a pretty good sized one and ran a successful auto repair shop for a number of years with which he supported a sizable family - there ended up being seven of us children altogether. His garage and junk yard also provided a necessary service to the community of course. Evidently there's a lot to be said for hard work, native wit, pure endurance and, well, a sense of adventure. Horatio Alger would have been proud.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)Lovely piece!
Cliff,this articale had me in tears..it was the funniest ever.What a tragically, wonderful story.
Wonderfully told, very Maine! Well done.
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