Otherworldly Maine

by Noreen Doyle

  Then I noticed that the half-drowned pilot was watching the TV with us, reaching out with one hand to point at the screen.

  “Alaska,” he said. “I’m from Alaska. Sitka, Alaska.”

  “Well good for you,” Ted said. “You sound like you’re getting your wits back after that crash.”

  “But this isn’t Alaska?” the pilot asked.

  “Afraid not,” said Dan.

  “Then where am I?

  Only in Maine could you give him an honest answer that would only confuse him, and Ben did just that, quickly and without thinking.

  “West Poland,” he said.

  The pilot’s jaw dropped and his eyes grew large and round.

  “Maine,” I added quickly. “West Poland, Maine. Near Auburn and Lewiston.”

  It didn’t help.

  “You mean I’m not in Alaska?” the pilot asked weakly. “But . . . but. that’s impossible. I took off from Sitka this morning. I can’t be in Maine.”

  His name was Norm Reynolds and he lived in Sitka, the first Russian settlement in Alaska, down in the panhandle, about 90 miles from Juneau.

  “I took off from there before dawn,” he said. “Headed over to Prince of Wales Island. The sun was coming up and I flew into a bright cloud. When I came out the other side, it didn’t look like Alaska anymore. So I came down on the lake out there. Messed that up good, didn’t I.”

  “You hit your head pretty hard,” I said. “Are you sure you aren’t just confused?”

  “Today’s Thursday, August 23rd isn’t it?”

  “All day,” Ben said.

  “I’m not confused about that,” Norm said with a pained smile. He put his face in his hands, rubbed his eyes, then added: “This is impossible.”

  “Not exactly,” Dan said.

  “Not exactly?” I asked.

  “Not if you look at the physics of it,” he replied.

  When Dan was a boy, he wanted to go to college somewhere where people didn’t have an accent. So his folks packed him up in an old Volvo station wagon and sent him off to Boston. He didn’t like Harvard much. He was too smart for BD and BC and all them little schools. But he liked MIT just fine. Stuck around and went through an ungodly amount of money until he dropped out a semester before graduating. That was the year they were shooting college students. He generally kept his education to himself. I kind of wished he’d done it that morning. But he didn’t.

  “Scientists have known for years about how the universe is constructed,” he said. “There’s eleven dimensions—maybe more, depending on how you do your math. Three of them are the ones we know. The ones that tell you where you are. And then there’s time, that’s another dimension. But all the rest of them are infinitesimally small. They’re all folded up inside the others.”

  Ben grinned, and said: “I know that, Dan. You’ve explained it to us before.”

  Dan shrugged him off and continued. “Well it stands to reason that if most of the dimensions are infinitesimally small, then down there everything is already connected to everything else, all in the same place, all together. So if something slips—like across one of those extra dimensions—it could easily end up someplace else.”

  “Aren’t there laws against that?” Ben asked. “Conservation of stuff or something?”

  “Ayuh,” Dan said. “But there’s loopholes.”

  “Loopholes?” Ted asked credulously.

  “If something’s too small to measure or happens too quick, it can violate the laws.”

  “But Dan, that float plane out there at the bottom of the lake doesn’t look too small to measure, does it?”

  “I don’t know, Dan,” Ben said. “Sounds like an episode of ‘Twilight Zone’ to me.” He hummed a few bars of the theme song to the old TV show, “Dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee.”

  “Old Rod did love those disappearing airplane stories,” I said.

  “I remember those,” Ted said. “There was one where the pilot came from World War I and landed in Canada or somewhere.”

  “France,” said Dan.

  “What?” Ted asked.

  “He landed in France.”

  “Ayuh,” Ben said. “And another one where an airliner flew over Central Park and saw dinosaurs.”

  “What about the one where the bomber crashed in the desert and Bob Cummings spent an hour trying to find the rest of his crew?” I asked.

  “That was a special one-hour show with a write-up in TV Guide,” Ben said.

  “What about all those stories about people who disappeared?” Ted asked. “That judge who walked around a horse and vanished into thin air? Or the man who came out of nowhere and ended up getting murdered in a snowy graveyard with no one else’s footprints around?”

  “We all grew up hearing those stories,” I said. “It comes from living up here in the woods with nothing else to do at night.”

  “You fellows can laugh all you want,” Dan said dryly. “But there’s one thing you need to consider.”

  “What’s that?” Ted asked.

  “There’s something going on out in Alaska that the government doesn’t want us to hear about on the news.”

  “I think I need to see a doctor,” Norm moaned, putting a hand to his head where Dan had placed one of those big Band-Aids on the cut.

  “Or a physicist,” Ben quipped.

  “He’s probably right, you know,” I said. “Maybe it’s time to call the EMTs.”

  “If we do, they’ll bring the state troopers,” Ted said. “And they’ll bring the Homeland Stupidity. And I’ll end up at the other end of the lake with Emma Tripp in the old Girl Scout camp.”

  “Ted, by now someone’s probably already called everyone,” Ben said. “There’s forty cottages around the lake, and I’ll bet everyone saw that plane go down.”

  Ted turned white, then scrambled over to the stepladder, which we’d folded up in the corner after he hooked up the satellite dish.

  “You know, Ted,” I said, “if you’re so worried about Homeland Security, you can always turn the TV off before they get here. They won’t know you’ve been watching the Canadian news.”

  Ted’s shoulders sagged under the weight of the painfully obvious and he looked embarrassed at not thinking of it himself.

  “I guess I could,” he said.

  “But not just yet,” Dan said. “The English-language broadcast just came on. Turn it up, will you, Ted.”

  Everyone turned their attention to the screen as a new newscaster, a mousy brunette with her hair in a flip, repeated the top story for the non-Quebecois who were tuned in.

  “And in Alaska, the government today announced a daring surprise raid by the Canadian Defense Force into the Juneau area just before dawn. Aided by the RCMP, more than five hundred special forces crossed the border near the Alaskan state capital and secured several detention camps in the area. More than a thousand political prisoners held in the camps were freed and transported back across the border before U.S. forces were able to respond. In Ottawa, government spokesmen said the action was taken at the urging of the European Union, the United Nations, and a number of Latin American governments. U.S. officials lodged a protest at the Canadian embassy and threatened unspecified retaliatory actions.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Ben said.

  “Hooray for the Canadians,” Dan said, raising a fist into the air.

  “I can see why they don’t want that getting out on CNN,” I said.

  And then all of a sudden I had that image again of the old largemouth bass hiding out in the reeds and the shadows at the bottom of the lake, with my bright, shiny lure flashing through the sunlight, trying to attract his attention.

  I turned to Norm.

  “Something tells me that you know more about this thing in Alaska than you’re letting on,” I said. “You know what they say. You can tell someone from Maine, but you can’t tell them much.”

  Norm looked up and shook his head. “I took off from Sitka this morning before dawn and flew int
o a cloud. When I came out, I was over your lake.”

  “If you’re going to stick with that story, then the rest of us have a decision to make,” I said.

  I could see the lights come on in Ben’s eyes, but Ted looked confused. “What are you saying, Toby?” he asked.

  “Despite Dan’s explanation of eleven-dimensional space-time physics, I just don’t think Norm is telling us the truth,” I said. “I don’t think he’s from Alaska. And I don’t think he flew out of any mysterious cloud over our lake.”

  “He’s a Canadian,” Ben said.

  Norm wasn’t budging. “I’m from Alaska,” he said. “Sitka, Alaska.”

  “Ted, turn off that television,” I said. “We don’t want anyone to know we’ve been watching Canadian news.”

  “We don’t?” asked Ben.

  “Not if we’re going to stick to Norm’s story, we aren’t. Besides, we don’t want to get Ted into trouble when Homeland Security gets here, do we?”

  “We sure don’t,” Ted said.

  “The way I see it, if Norm is a Canadian and not an Alaskan, he’s got a good reason for making up a wild story like this. We’ve got two choices. We can tell the Homeland Security people what we think—and let on that we’ve been watching the news from Canada. Or we can keep our mouths shut and let whatever is going to happen happen.”

  We looked at one another without saying a word for a long moment.

  And a couple minutes later, Dan was on his cell phone to the state police, asking for help for a downed pilot. “And the damndest thing is,” he said, “the guy says he took off from Alaska before dawn, flew into a cloud, and came out over the lake.”

  About twenty minutes after that, all the state troopers in southern Maine rolled into the parking lot in front of The Cabana with their blue lights flashing. An EMT rescue truck followed them up. And then a pair of black helicopters that didn’t make any noise were landing on the lawn beside the lake, full of Homeland Security officers.

  They rounded us up, put each of us in a different police car and Norm in the rescue truck, and headed off towards Auburn, with the helicopters keeping close escort all the way.

  They were still asking us questions when the Canadian helicopters came in low out of the north and dropped in on the old Girl Scout camp, with their special forces and Mounties, to liberate Emma Tripp and all the others they had locked up there.

  Norm was just a decoy. A lure to pull the Homeland Security guys out of the reeds and shadows and keep them busy while the real mission was on its way.

  He was still telling them about that mysterious cloud—and we were still backing him up right up until the end. Until it was too late.

  Eventually they let us go.

  They told us not to tell anyone what had happened. They told us it wouldn’t matter, because the newspapers and TV wouldn’t be allowed to cover it. And they told us that if we did go talking about it, they’d take away our Social Security and put us in that Girl Scout camp.

  But word got out anyway. It’s hard to keep secrets up here.

  And some thought we were heroes, while some thought we were traitors. But we were just a few old Mainers in the right place at the right time.

  DREAMS OF VIRGINIA DARE

  John P. O’Grady

  I was there the night it all began, but the greater part of this story I’ve had to piece together over the years from reports of others, mostly friends of mine, who are usually pretty honest. It’s customary in these situations to start by saying something like, “Verily, this tale is true.” At least that’s how all the old books begin. They claim that the power of enchantment—whether a magical charm, or an eloquent poem, or a good story told around the table—is so great that it is able to overwhelm all of nature. I don’t know about that, but just try saying “I love you” to someone for the first time and see how the world is changed, for good or ill.

  Nostalgia, too, must be something like this. After a couple of decades, people look back on their college years and say, “That was a magical time.” Those folks are speaking figuratively and from a distance. What I’m trying to do is figure out some things, and thereby draw a little closer to the offbeat phenomena of the world, which, if they aren’t magic in a literal sense are without a doubt “wicked,” as they say in Maine, “wicked weird.”

  It was a college bull session. First day back for the fall semester and everybody was excited because there was a big football game the next day to kick off the new school year. A bunch of people were sitting around in the dorm lounge introducing themselves to each other or catching up on the summer’s news with old friends. Among them was a new guy named Leo LaHapp, a freshman, who was on the cross-country team. Talk got around to the courses people were taking and a couple said they were enrolled in Early American History. So Barb Taylor asked, “Does anybody remember Virginia Dare? I just love that name.”

  Virginia Dare, you may recall, was the first child born of English parents in the New World: August 18, 1587, on Roanoke Island in North Carolina. Not a good place to be from, all things considered, since not long after her birth everybody there disappeared without a trace. A few years later, when a long-delayed supply ship finally showed up from England, all they found were abandoned buildings overgrown with vines and a single word carved into a tree: Croatoan. Nobody knew what it meant, and there were no further signs of what happened to those unfortunate souls. All of them, including the baby Virgina Dare, were gone, never to be heard from again.

  We were in Maine, so North Carolina seemed a pretty exotic topic—warm weather, sunny beaches, spring breaks—and it gave rise that evening to all kinds of fantastic speculations and associations. Somebody said that he knew of a bar called Croatoan—he thought that was the name—but it was down in South Boston. Somebody else said he was going to start a rock band and call it Croatoan. He imagined that none of the members in this band would ever take the stage and nobody would know what they look like; instead they’d play in some hidden location far removed from the audience and pipe in the music via speakers so it would all be very mysterious, and rumors could start that the band was really led by Jim Morrison, who hadn’t died after all.

  That’s when Leo LaHapp spoke up. He wasn’t called “The Bugman” yet. It was the first time anybody there had heard from him, so he was given the floor, and he surprised us by going on at length. Not a person in the room could have anticipated the succession of events after that. I realize that those of you who were there at the University of Maine will remember some of the incidents I’m about to recall—especially the infamous Witch Hunt—but so far as I know, the strange and disparate occurrences of those days have never been brought together in an adequate account. I don’t make any great claims for my own story, but it must suffice until a more satisfactory version is put forth.

  Anyway, Leo LaHapp launched into his story, telling the group—all of whom were strangers to him—that he had once been to Roanoke Island and had seen there a marble statue of Virginia Dare. It was sculpted in the nineteenth century by Maria Louise Lander, a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it was the most exquisite work of art he had ever seen. This statue was life sized, presenting Virginia Dare as a beautiful young woman, mostly naked, a detail Leo delivered with great relish. He described her as standing, scantily clad, in the midst of a fancy garden, with flowering trees and sweet-smelling shrubs all around. It was as if the baby Virginia Dare had somehow escaped from the ill-fated colony and had grown up and was now living in Eden or Arcadia or maybe, as Leo believed, Croatoan.

  Then he spoke of a legend concerning this statue, how on certain nights of the year it comes to life and starts walking around. “If only it were so,” Leo sighed. “Something like that is very hard to believe, I know, and I don’t go for it myself, but she does come to me in my special dream.”

  That got a few snickers from the audience, but we all wanted to hear more about this special dream, so we encouraged him to continue.

  “I’m at home and f
or some reason my family has this huge dead bear in the middle of the living room. It’s stuffed like it came from the taxidermist, so I ask around but nobody can tell me why this bear is here. ‘Who killed it?’ I keep asking my father, but he just tells me to go ask my mother, but I can’t find her anywhere. Next thing you know, a big tree starts growing out of the bear’s head. It’s huge and already very old, even though it just sprouted. As it rises up, I think it’s going to break through the roof of the house, but when I look up, there is no roof—it’s gone and everything’s just night sky with stars blazing and the tree soaring up there so high it looks like its leaves are the stars. Then way up there I see a woman swinging on a swing. She’s naked and her skin is shiny white like marble. It’s Virginia Dare. But she’s not a statue anymore, she’s alive and she’s swinging and smiling and waving down to me. She wants me to climb up the tree, but the trunk is so big I can’t get my arms around it. There’s no place to grab hold. I get all upset because I can’t climb the tree and I won’t be able to go up there and sit on the swing and swing back and forth among the starry leaves with Virginia Dare. It’s really frustrating. But she keeps swinging and smiling and waving down, as if to urge me on, so I try once more. Then I wake up.”

  He finished his recitation by expressing the wistful hope that one day, if that statue of Virginia Dare really does come to life and go for walks, she might make the trip up to Maine and pay him a visit. “In the meantime,” he concluded, “at least I have my special dream.”

  A couple of the women in the audience thought the story quite romantic, but mostly people just snickered some more and exchanged knowing looks or the cuckoo sign with each other. When some of the guys started teasing him about being in love with a chunk of rock, Leo just got up and left, insulted.

  But the talking went on well into the night, moving away from Leo and his statue to related topics of magic potions and amulets. “Wouldn’t it be fun,” Westphal suggested, “to find some way to grant Leo his wish and have that statue stop by and give him a thrill?” More plotting and scheming followed. At last somebody—I think it was Crilly Fritz (a real name by the way)—said: “Let’s go find the Magician!”