A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  Let him begin:

  I went on my first drive in 1925, over on the Machias River. The job took forty-two days. First we drove what's called Old Stream, and drove it to the end. There was prime logs so big we couldn't ford them into the main river, and I imagine some are laying on the bank right now. We moved from there to the Mopang, which is another tributary of the Machias, and we drove that in too. Less of a business, because there were a little more water. Mopang had a dam, and we could build up a head before we sent our wood.

  When we got done with Old Stream and the Mopang, we took for Third Machias Lake, where an old fella from Wesley named Jim McLean had cut a million board feet in the eastern arm. That put us back to a tough job, getting the booms out of there and down through the islands. You know them islands: pretty as a picture to look at, but oh my! Finally we made it, and we sluiced the timber, and followed those logs a month and a half till we come into Whitneyville, down on the coast. That was the end of our drive.

  There lived a family name of Sullivan in that town, very wealthy, because they'd sold a lot of land to St. Regis, which is Champion International now. Folks said the Sullivans was worth a million dollars, and that meant money in those days. That was really money. But still one old Sullivan was left who kept on running a store.

  This particular Mr. Sullivan and his wife had a tame bear: oh, a big old brute, but you could pat him on the head like a dog. Well, the storekeeper told us how he arrived at him. You see, there was a bounty on bear. I'm not claiming there should have been, but there it was. And one day a fella comes in lugging a cub he found by the side of the road, because someone apparently killed his mother. And this Sullivan says right off, "Take him out." But his wife meant to contradict him: "We'll keep the bear." Was that like a woman? Tender-hearted.

  Well, the first year they built him a yard and a house and made a great pet of him. When it came November, though, he wouldn't eat. And they was nervous over it, being fond of him by then. They didn't have any help, and the animal seemed like a fine companion. An old trapper came in, and he said, "There's nothing wrong with your bear. Put some straw in his house. He wants to go to sleep, is all." They done it, and sure enough he got through the winter.

  By the next fall he was grown into quite a junk of a bear, and as I say they'd made a great friend of him. But somehow the missus knew something, and she said to her husband, "He's getting restless. Go out and put on his collar." Old Sullivan done what she asked. He was a nice man. But come morning, the bear had slipped that collar. Gone. And Mr. Sullivan told her, "It's just as well. He's better off in the wild."You see, I keep talking about how dear the beast was to these folks, but the old fella—truth is, he wasn't all that attached.

  The following April commenced unusual warm. Mr. Sullivan took to sleeping in a downstairs bedroom to keep an eye on the goods, because the windows was open. He told me that in the middle of the night he became conscious of a great weight upon him. He reached down and fetched up two hands full of hair. The bear was laying right across him. Came in one of them windows.

  You know what the old guy said? "Earl," he said, "that was one of life's darkest moments." After being gone so long in the woods, who knew but the bear turned ugly? But this Sullivan prayed a little, I imagine, and then he rolled the bear off the bed, took him out to the yard and put that collar back on again. And the wife, my, she was really happy about her bear being back again. But I'll tell you: that was really a story.

  And that bear never went back to the woods.

  In my time, I have shot and trapped more bear than I want to speak of. The last one I caught was a female, and I had to shoot her because she put up such a fight. I got remorseful, and I told my wife that evening, "I'll never set the trap again," and I didn't. A few years ago I sold that trap for $150. I paid sixty when I bought it. Of course, it's a monstrous thing, you know, big enough that you have to set it with clamps. But I got so sick from watching that old bear fight as hard as she did.

  That river drive was a mighty tough job, if you want me to be honest. We worked practically all the daylight there were. An old man cooked for thirty-eight other men over an open fire, and he had three cookees, which dried the pans and dishes by sticking all of them in a flour sack and working them back and forth. By golly, that cook was quite a man. Charlie Rogers. I remember him well. I did like him.

  Well, I liked most of the men in that crew. I got on with them all. There wasn't any brawling or fighting. You had to get along. I weighed 195 pounds or so in them days, pretty rugged. But there was no trouble. We worked hard enough to keep us tamed down pretty good. We all worked hard, downriver or back home, and we used each other in a proper way.

  Don't let me say there was never any hard feelings of any kind, but a lot of them comical too. I'll tell you a story, true one. We had a fella in these parts back then, Jim Bacon. He lived out on Tough End, same as I do, and he was a character. There came a peddler with a horse and wagon about twice a month—Reuben, the peddler. He had different things for sale in his cart, but mostly clothes. And he was up to the Grand Lake landing when Jim and I came in from guiding one evening and pulled up our canoes.

  Now Jim's pants was bedraggled somewhat, so he went over and said, "Reuben, you got pants? I need some." Reuben told him yes, and Jim sorted through till he found a pair that'd do him. We were paid five dollars a day as guides then, so when he asked Reuben his price, and when Reuben told him four dollars, why, Jim looked around and said "God almighty, I'd sell everything I own for four dollars! Moccasins, hat and all."

  Reuben says, "Take 'em off."

  They bargained pretty near till dark before Jim agreed to sell everything he had on but his union suit. He got down Middlewalk by the canal without seeing anyone, but at the bridge who does he meet but Agnes Yates? Now Agnes, she had a tongue like no one you ever heard. She pointed a finger at him and said, "Jim Bacon, somebody ought to shoot you." And Jim looked back over at her and said, "You know something, Agnes? If you was my wife, I'd save them the trouble."

  Now these are stories, aren't they? We could remember them all. Still can. It's a changed world. We told stories. We lived with stories.

  Now they was going to have a parade this last Independence with what was left of us old guides. Damn few. They meant to haul us in a wagon. What would be your opinion of that? Well, it's no matter, because the day was rainy and they never had their show.

  Of course there's TV and all that now. That's not the same as stories.

  But I admit there were sides of those old days I speak of that was grim. Quite grim. There's always that, I guess. I had a great friend in Creston MacArthur. He was maybe thirteen years old when I moved over to Tough End in 1932. He came by a lot, right till he died a few years back. A nice guy, good-hearted, help you out any time he could. And you know, I miss him something awful. I bet you do too, Syd. Anybody would.

  Life is full of sadness. We lost a daughter, our youngest one. She was away at school at the time. She was sixteen. And then our oldest son. He come back from Vietnam after that war was over, and he'd had a lot of training in heavy equipment. He found a job at Georgia Pacific, and he still works for the same outfit. He got himself married, and by and by him and her didn't get along all that well. So one day his wife brought our grandson Tommy over and left him. He was two years old. She gave him to Tecky. My wife's real name is Thelma, but her family was from County Clare and very Irish and that's what they called her and everyone still does.

  Doggone it, we raised that child. He grew into quite a boy. Finally he got work in the mill in Woodland and boarded there. No car. He and some others was looking over guns, and they called it suicide. It wasn't suicide. One of them guns went off and killed him. And you live with those things. It's never easy. He was a nice boy. He could cast a fly pretty good. Of course, he had a lot of practice on the stream here. The stream's not what it was, naturally. I caught a couple this spring. They was filled out nice, but I let them go. I didn't need them.

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p; Yes, you tell a lot of stories, but memories will bear down on you. When people talk about the days before the changes, sometimes you'd think it was heaven on earth. But yes, we did have stories, you want to believe. Enough to go around. You take Warren Berry, an old timer like me. Gone now. Warren and I got together when they built the naval base down in Machias. Carpenters. Our main job was finishing off the Quonset huts for the personnel to live in.

  One day we traveled out to visit a fella in East Machias who was a friend of Warren's, because Warren was raised in that town. This man's name was Freddie McGeorge, and he had a mill there, a sawmill. Freddie told us of how one morning, when something was bothering in the mill, he went to the phone, the old kind hanging on the wall, which you cranked up. He got the operator and she kept saying, "I can't understand you, Mr. McGeorge, I can't understand you." So finally Freddie got a little ugly and he said, "Well, Jesus H. Christ! There, did you understand that?"

  Now this operator didn't like it. She told him, "Mr. McGeorge, you cannot use profanity on the telephone. I'm going to send a fellow up to take your speaker out." He said, "You can do it, and then stuff it up your butt." Oh, he had a temper.

  Well, the man came to take the phone away. Mr. McGeorge said, "I'll make one more call before you start in," and the man said that would be all right. He got the operator again, and she said to him: "Oh, Mr. McGeorge, I'm so happy you called me to apologize." He said, "Lady, I didn't call for that. That fella's here after the phone, so you best get your drawers down."

  By and by, of course, Warren and I came home to go guiding, which I done for seventy years. Today I don't take anyone except for one old party—oh, maybe two or three—which I've had for a very long time. All I have now is what they call an honorary guide's license, you see, so I don't tie on to too much.

  The fishing's not a shadow of what it was anyhow, and won't ever be again. But in the thirties, the Depression years across the country . . . well, a person needed a fish. Hadn't have been for them, and raising a garden— well, folks would've had a mighty tough go.

  In the forties, things was picking up again and I was guiding a couple. They looked around and saw how beautiful everything was. Don't know why I remember them special; they called it so pretty, and by God it still is. Five dollars a day, though, and a long day too. And now it's a hundred and twenty. I went to a meeting when it was still a hundred and I told the young guides they weren't going to get so many parties, they were going to overprice their business. And they said, Oh no, they had to have another twenty dollars on top, which was a mistake. That was a mistake. I said, "Boys, go ahead, it don't mean a thing to me. My days are gone." But these young fellas thought that was the thing to do and they done it.

  Well, I guess, why not? I want to tell you, though, I think we might've been better neighbors when we had less money. Seems so anyhow.

  But I was telling you about this couple in the forties. I guided them very frequently and for many years. Now the woman looked about—it was a wonderful day, all right—and she commented on how it appeared. But she was a long way from a fool, and she asked me, "Earl, were you poor in the Depression years?" I said, "Missus, everybody was poor, not just me. But I can let you know just how poor I was. I had a hound that oftentimes got so weak from hunger he had to lean agin a bank to bark." She said, "You'll never change." And I don't know but she was right. She's gone on too.

  Times get better, but you look back on the old days and the old-timers. We'd be guiding together, sometimes two, maybe three of us to a party, and everything was peaceful. However, I went down about a year ago to what they call the Lynn Farm on the west bank of the St. Croix River. We caught some fairly good fish, and when it came time for lunch, I pulled us onto what's known as Birch Rips Island, after the rips that was there back when we sluiced logs in that country.

  One young fella said, "Well, you don't know as you have permission to lunch here, and it's a private island." I said, "I know the lady that owns it." And for some reason that just made him cross somehow. "Oh," he looks at me and says, "you're always right, ain't you?" I told him, "Well, on this particular occasion I do happen to be right." You wouldn't call that conversation. But I guess there's no substitute for youth, and they're good boys. Some of them could do a little better sometimes. Well, who couldn't?

  Maybe it's all how you're raised to conduct yourself. I came from what they call Basswood Ridge over in New Brunswick, born there, in my grandfather's home. His wife was another one out of County Clare, Ireland. And what do you suppose her maiden name was? J-O-Y. Joy. And she spoke of a potato famine when she was fourteen, and that was the major food of the Irish people. So over into Canada she immigrated with her parents.

  Finally she came to St. Stephen, New Brunswick, and got a job housekeeping for the Eaton family in Calais. Eatons were of a big name there; they'd sold land to St. Croix Pulpwood. They lived by one of the bridges. There were four bridges in town then, not just two. She met my granddaddy because he was working in one of the mills in that part, which they called Milltown and still do. And then granddad bought his place out in New Brunswick and finally I was born there, as I mentioned.

  But both of my parents were born on this side, so when the time came, when I was of an age, all I had to do was go down to Machias and declare my intentions, because Ma and Pa were from over here, and were living in Grand Lake Stream at the time, since I was five. That's how I got to be a U.S. citizen. Pretty easy.

  I went to school some here in Grand Lake. A lady asked me—the same one who wanted to know was I poor in the Depression—how much schooling I had. I told her three days. She said, "Three days?" I said, "My brother got sick and I took his place." But I actually went through the grammar school. After that, a scholar had to go away to Woodland every day, which I done a year, but then I started in to work. I did this and that, and then I joined in with the drives. I made the first one when I was twenty. Twenty years old.

  Another job I had was hanging boom stock. You see, down on the west river, there's big flowage areas near the dam at Grand Falls. And they had to boom the logs off, to keep the pulpwood from getting in among them stumps, because it was so costly to pull them out of there again. The fella who was the boss on the upriver work, old Bill Priestley, he said, "I don't know how you can do it." I was green. "You walk clear out about to the end of one of them sticks and you hop onto another and you ain't fallen in yet." I told him, "Give me time." Of course I had a pair of good cog boots, made by the Bass company, and I have them today in my shop. Stepped over a lot of timber, they did.

  But there was a session when I got clear of the logging trade. I traveled out west, and I'll tell you how it happened. Over in New Brunswick, they had a special train they put on for volunteers who wanted to go into Manitoba and Saskatchewan, which was grain provinces, to work the harvest. We was making two dollars a day working for the pulp company, and if you weren't a chopper it was one dollar. Just one. I was a chopper, but still . . .

  They didn't have the combines back in those days, but they did have the reapers and binders. They burned chaff from the fields to make their steam. We went behind and grabbed the middle strings of the sheaves and stood them butts down, with one on the side, one in the middle, and one on the other side. This they called stooking. Those stooks would dry where we left them. Then came the thrashing machine, and that machine would thrash sometimes seventy bushel a day of wheat. They thrashed some oats too.

  That was Saskatchewan. Five dollars a day, and we thought that was big money, but when we got paid off by the landowners, two brothers, we headed for a poker game in the town of Moose Jaw. You already can tell me what happened: I got up at three in the morning, and all I had was my clothes and my hat and my moccasins. My friend Raymond Caldwell, why, he was in the same mess. We lost our money. All that money, gone.

  Me and Raymond took a job in a grain elevator for two dollars a day. We didn't like it a particle, so we got thinking about going down in Montana, which borders on the provinc
e. We went to the immigration, and I showed them I was a U.S. citizen. Now Raymond wasn't, so they gave him quite an interrogation. He answered all the questions, though, and so they finally said, "OK, you can go." We landed in some bar that night, and we were having a beer when a gentleman came in with a hat three times bigger than mine.

  He saw what we were drinking and he said, "You down on your luck some?"

  I said to him, "You want to believe we are. How'd you tell?"

  He told me, "Most fellas around here drink a little whiskey."

  "Well," we told him, "beer'll do us, I guess."

  Right then he spoke of a ranch he owned up toward the Milk River. "I could give you boys a job," he said. "The wages won't be much, but you'll get through the winter. Tell me where you're staying and I'll pick you up in the morning. We'll go by train." Sure enough, at daylight he called at the room we had, and we boarded a car.

  Now did he have a ranch! Cattle, and then some more cattle. And horses. Them little broncos would kick us off just for exercise, but the men that lived there—well, they stuck on a saddle like glue. Raymond and I got a little better in time, but we pulled a lot of leather for a while, I'll tell you.

  We stayed there for winter, just like our boss promised. Twenty dollars a month and our board, and if it hadn't been for a sheepskin coat I'd have caught my death. You see, I thought I'd been cold in Maine, but I hadn't. Some days out there would've froze an Eskimo in the cellar. It was the wind. By God, it took two men to hold on one man's hat! Which meant a poor chance if you was on a horse, and so we was most times.

  Imagine Raymond and me—wranglers! But that's what we done. We'd drive those cows into the fenced lot and let them feed, and then come afternoon drive them out again because they'd waste more than they'd eat if you left them in. That was the procedure, every day. It was how that rancher wanted to do it, and he was smart. He was a pretty good guy too. Saved us, you could say.