GRANDFATHERING

Every summer I try to spend quality time with my grandchildren and this past week has been filled with that. The girls aged nine and ten are easiest. We go to a pleasant place, talk about the books they’re reading, or just sit on the porch and be together sharing thoughts, stories, and feelings past and present. The boys, however, want to do something adventurous like fish, or ride in the woods on the ATV. They range in age from seven (twin boys) to twenty. The oldest grandson is out on the west coast these days but he comes back to visit regularly. The rest live here in Maine.

Last week the twins visited us at the South Portland house. Fishing is just about all they want to do in summer. They brought their salt-water rigs to do some ocean fishing. I’ve been taking them to various lakes and ponds around Lovell for the last four or five years where they’ve caught sunfish and perch using worms. In the early years I was mostly occupied making sure they didn’t hook one another or me. I was all day baiting hooks, taking fish off of them, untangling crossed lines, and trying to remove hooks and bobbers from tree branches.

Over the years, however, they’ve gotten more skilled. They know how to cast, bait their own hooks, remove fish, and they use lures effectively. Sometimes they put down the fishing rods to go about the shoreline catching frogs and snakes. I’m free to share their excitement and remember how good if felt doing the same things when I was seven with my best friend Philip at our local pond. Now I have time to take pictures of them, one of my favorite things to do.

Anyway, we all went to Willard Beach in South Portland. The women stayed on the sand, the granddaughters collected hermit crabs in some nearby rocks while the women talked. We boys walked over to Spring Point Light to fish off the jetty. I purchased sand worms which do not resemble worms we use in fresh water. Sand worms look more like centipedes and they can bite you with pincers on their heads. The twins used needle-nose pliers to hold them while baiting their hooks.

After loosing several rigs on rock weed and lobster trap lines, we moved over to the Southern Maine Community College pier. Following lots of casts and having multiple sand worms nibbled off their hooks, each of the twins caught a crab. I got a sunburn. The twins were happy and, though tired, I was happy too — because they were. The next day I saw a Boston Globe story about three teenaged boys who caught a giant tuna off the Maine coast in Maine and recorded the drama and their excitement on their smart phones. I posted it on Facebook hoping it would be shown to the twins. Their mother reported their differing reactions. Although hard to tell apart, the twins are not identical and their personalities are quite different as well. One was thrilled, my daughter said, and other “wants to legislate tuna fishing because the population is dwindling.”

Got a crab

Saturday I spent in the woods with my fourteen-year-old grandson. For probably ten years now, he’s been most interested to ride my ATV, so that’s what we do. First he was a passenger behind me. Then I got a smaller ATV that he could operate himself as long as I was right behind him on mine with a kill switch to his in hand. Eventually he outgrew that little one and now operates my big one with me on the back as a passenger where he used to sit. I quickly discovered it’s not as comfortable back there as it is on the driver’s seat. There are lots of trails in Lovell and neighboring Waterford, Maine and we explored most of them — so many that my ass was fairly sore by the end of the day.

In the woods

I brought along some old maps because the trails we traveled were once roads connecting now-abandoned neighborhoods. All that’s left are cellar holes which can be difficult to find when the woods are all leafed out. The first one we spotted on the back side of Sebattus Mountain belonged to a family named Kimball in the 19th century. It’s an old Maine family name and, as luck would have it, it’s also my grandson’s surname, though his branch spells it Kimble.

Posing by the "Hand in Rock" carving

After several hours, it was very nice to get back home and rest in my soft recliner on the back porch and hope I’ll still have enough energy to do it all again next year.

Waning Summer

Most people know I'm a teacher around here. "Summer's over," they tell me at the Post Office, the store, the gas station, because school started three weeks ago. But it's not over. Waning, yes, but it hasn't ended just because the school busses are running. It started early and it's been a grand one.There was very little rain. Water grass on Lower Kezar Pond exposed some nice red stalks. It was a nice day for kayaking.Out for a walk one day with granddaughter Claire and daughter Annie. Another granddaughter is incubating about three feet down to the lower right. Can't wait to see her. Life is good.Claire likes me.Saw a bald eagle annoyed with an osprey one day over Kezar Lake. Chased him all over the sky for about a minute. It was quite a show.The sun came up behind a spider web the next day. I was running late, but stopped anyway for this. Got my shoes all wet in the dew, but it was worth it. Gotta take time for beauty.Afternoon clouds gathered in the western sky.Alway liked mills like these in Saco. Oak logs were floated down the Saco River - possibly from here in Fryeburg/Lovell - to hold up the floors. Local brick, local wood, power from the river. All so ruggedly built, they survive to this day. Many have been gutted and await commercial tenants looking for office space, but a slow economy and glut of commercial real estate threaten these magnificent old buildings. Hope this sunset over the mills isn't foreshadowing.Sunset over Kezar Lake. Is that a dolphin? A character from "Neverending Story"?

Sick Water

It was a beautiful lake if you looked at it from a distance. There were fields sloping down to the water’s edge on the far shore and rolling hills visible beyond. Several nicely-built homes dotted other stretches of waterfront but the lake was dying.

This wasn’t what I expected to find. Exploring back roads on the other side of Lewiston last week, I’d picked up a sandwich and pulled over to a sandy beach on Sabattus Pond next to Route 126. It was a humid ninety degrees and one would expect the beach to be packed with cars, children and mothers on beach chairs; but it wasn’t. Mine was the only car and the only life in evidence was a couple of crows hopping along past the occasional soda can or discarded food wrapper. Further down was a boarded-up old bath house. This was mid-July, the height of Maine’s summer, and the beach looked like a moonscape. I got out, walked to the water’s edge, and looked down. The lake was almost opaque in a yellowish green haze, a kind of thinned-out pea soup. Depressing.

Sabattus Pond is a misnomer. It’s big enough to be a lake and that makes its impending death more tragic. I had questions - like when did the lake get sick, for instance, so I checked out my Maine Atlas and Gazetteer and found a boat landing along the western shore. Two guys were backing up a trailer to a floating bass boat and I asked one how long the water had been like this. He’d only been around about six years, he said, and the algae blooms occurred every year. He’d heard there was a chicken farm on a river flowing into the lake that had fouled it. “Killed it,” was more accurate I thought. Looking at the atlas again, I noticed one of the in-flowing rivers was aptly named - the Dead River. “The bass fishing is good,” he said, “but I wouldn’t dare eat any of them.”

Further along the Sawyer Road next to the eastern edge of Sabattus Pond, there were smaller roads leading to the shore. Exploring these, I noticed cottages with water frontage in fairly good repair, but on the inland side of the roads many were not maintained. Quite a few displayed overgrown lawns, rusty old “For Sale” signs, and generalized disrepair. Some appeared outright abandoned. It was depressing.

As I crossed the town line from Sabattus into Greene, the road moved away from the shore and properties were typical of rural Maine - some were kept up and others neglected. At the top of a hill was a beautiful farm with meticulously managed grounds. Next to it was a handsome stone building called the Sawyer Memorial, but its parking lot hadn’t been used for a while and I wondered why. There was grass growing up through cracks in the pavement. On the other side of the road I was surprised to see dozens of big old post-WWII army trucks parked in rows. I wondered what were they doing on a horse farm. A mile further on was a huge, fenced-in area containing several hundred old trucks painted in green camouflage. Researching online later, I learned they were M813, 5-ton, army vehicles manufactured in the 1980s. This compound looked deserted also. Tall grass growing up around them indicated the trucks hadn’t moved in a while. In my gloomy mood, the endless rows of metal and rubber seemed a huge waste.

Further along, I came to an old cemetery in the town of Wales. Gravestones dating back to the early 1800s had been pushed over and several were broken. Obelisks were toppled and though the grass had been mowed, no one had seen fit to repair the damage. The scene depressed me even further. Veterans of every conflict since the Civil War were buried there and I wondered who would wish to dishonor the graves of patriots. Was it an antiwar protest? Mindless vandalism by purposeless young men with nothing else to do? I couldn’t tell. Neither could I decide which would be worse.

A bit further on, the lake was back in view and I looked down across rolling hay fields to the sparkling water. Had I not stood on its shore, I wouldn’t have known it was dying. It was still beautiful from high up, reflecting the sun back to me, but its condition was critical. My circumnavigation showed not a single person swimming in it. Could the lake be flushed out and brought back to life? If so, what would it take? I thought of Kezar Lake in my own town. Its waters are still pure and I realized how important it is to keep them that way.

Sabattus Pond is dying. I strongly suspect, after my two-hour tour around it, that the economic and social health of the three communities on its shores is also suffering as a direct result.