by Mike Bond
– Gallup.com, April 4, 2014
“Maine is ranked 46 out of 50 states and rated F for political corruption”
– Center for Public Integrity
“The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country.”
– Thoreau, The Maine Woods
“She’s like a cat in the dark and then she is the darkness.”
– Fleetwood Mac
Dead of Winter
ACOYOTE BARKED downhill. As I stopped to listen a bullet cracked past my ear and smacked into the maple tree beside me. I dove off the trail skidding down the icy slope toward the cliff. Whack another bullet smashed into a trunk as I tumbled past, couldn’t stop sliding, couldn’t pull off my snowshoes, the cliff edge coming up fast as a shot whistled past my eyes, another by my neck.
My head hit a boulder and I spun jamming a snowshoe in brush. Another bullet spat past my ear and splintered a root. I tore loose from both snowshoes and leaped off the cliff down into a cluster of young hemlocks and deep drifts and came up gasping for air, bleeding and alive.
The shooter was above the cliff I’d just fallen off and had no angle of fire till I moved away from the bottom of the cliff. Unless he descended to the clifftop. Then he could shoot straight down on me.
I was going to die. The cliff of snow-dusted raw ice and stone seemed weirdly primeval, as if I’d been here before. Below me descended the bouldery rubble of what had once been part of this cliff, with another cliff below that, and all down the slope tall frozen hardwoods where if you got pinned down you were safe till the shooter got your angle and then there were not enough trees to protect you.
I’d lost my right boot pulling out of its snowshoe. The sock, ragged and soaked, left a smear of blood on the snow.
Was that footsteps near the clifftop, crunching crust? I was breathing so hard I couldn’t tell. If I ran and he was already there he’d shoot me easily in the back.
There was a terrible pain in my left hand. I stared at it stupefied. The ring finger was splayed ninety degrees sideways, dislocated. Once I saw it, it began to really hurt.
Trying to catch my breath and listening for the shooter, I pulled the finger straight but it would not drop back into the joint.
A shadow fell high up across a birch trunk: my shooter was above the cliff.
Like a wounded deer I darted downhill, running and dodging between tree trunks, slipping, skidding and tumbling ahead of the shots. The rifle sound so terrifying, the loud crack that crushes your ears, the physical whack of it, and if that bullet didn’t get you the next one will.
He stopped firing, maybe couldn’t see me through the trees. I slid, stumbled and ran a half mile further down the slope then circled back uphill above my trail, found a blowdown oak and broke off a hard limb like a baseball bat. I climbed higher and hid above my trail in a hemlock clump where I could see uphill but not be seen. If he followed my trail down the steep slope I had a chance of getting him with my oak limb as he walked past and before he could raise his gun.
My foot was freezing and very painful as was the dislocated finger. The pain was making me lightheaded, likely to make mistakes. I couldn’t move till dark, when I’d be harder to see and harder to shoot. Though I didn’t think my foot could wait that long without turning to ice.
And I still didn’t know where the shooter was.
Then came the snarl of a snowmobile on the ridge. Maybe it was him, leaving.
Or someone else going while he waited in the gathering dusk for me to return for my snowshoes and boot.
I sat cross-legged in the powdery snow watching my upslope trail, clasping my cold sodden foot, trying to set my finger back in its joint, shuddering, teeth clattering. The sun had quit the ridge and a deeper cold was sifting downhill. It was maybe minus twenty-five but going to get much colder. If I stayed out all night the shooter wouldn’t need to come back.
When facing death you sometimes get flashes of awareness, tragic epiphanies of what led to this fatal moment. As you gasp for breath and duck side to side running and falling and dashing on, expecting a bullet to smash your chest, you know how easy it would have been to avoid this.
It didn’t matter that three days ago I’d been surfing in sunny Hawaii. And now to help a buddy I couldn’t stand but to whom I owed my life, I was freezing to death in somebody’s gunsights on a snow-deep mountain in the backwoods of Maine.
Black Witch
LIKE MOST TROUBLE, it started with a phone call. I was sitting on my Oahu lanai with my Tanqueray double martini and bag of Maui chips, watching the sun set in a glorious firestorm across the blue-green sea. In the sinking sun you could see our world spinning on its axis, away from light into darkness. And in the sea’s vast horizon see the curvature of the earth, and sense the sun’s distance and how huge it is compared to our tiny home.
Two hundred yards beyond the beach a mother whale was teaching her baby to jump, leaping from the sea and splashing down with a great whap, the little one soaring after her. With the sunset and blue-green ocean and cool breeze smelling of bananas and plumeria, it was one of those moments when the joy and beauty of the universe unite, and all seems at peace.
Highway to Hell, the damn phone rings. 207, the Maine area code, so grudgingly I answer.
“He ain’t here,” I says.
“Who isn’t?” A woman, familiar.
I said nothing, realizing who she was and how much I didn’t want to talk to her.
“Is there any way to reach him?” She sounded rushed, worried.
“Not right now.”
“Sam? It is you! It’s Lexie…Bucky’s wife…Remember?”
What the hell did she mean by remember? Did she think I’d forget? But she wouldn’t be calling for no reason. “How are you?” I mumbled.
“I’m not well, we both aren’t, Bucky and me…”
Some marital squabble, maybe. So why call me?
“So I called because you two have the same experience –”
What – screwing you? I nearly said. “Lots of us guys did Afghanistan together. No news in that.”
“Like I said he’s in trouble.”
This I couldn’t imagine. Not straitlaced Bucky, who never met a regulation he didn’t love.
“He’s in maximum security at Warren.” Her voice thinned. “Awaiting trial for murder.”
“No,” I almost laughed. “Not possible.” By now I was pacing the lanai, looked out to sea and didn’t see it. “Who says?”
What I didn’t explain you is that Bucky’s originally from Maine. He and Lexie live on his old family farm making organic milk and eggs and beef and all that kind of stuff. Going back to his ancestral homeland was Bucky’s way of dealing with Afghanistan – all of us Special Forces guys, we have our own ways to forget – and his way was this pastoral hard-bitten life far from people and cities but close to animals and the land. And there could be a no more calming existence than to be there with Lexie, a person you can bury yourself in, she’s so strong and kind, and you learn to be there for her as she is for you.
I should know.
“It’s because of the windmills,” she said.
“I ain’t fighting them no more. Happy just to write about surfing… So how’s Bucky? Be sure give him my best.” You fake you, I told myself.
Lexie explained how two Maine governors and a bunch of legislators and “environmental” groups that were taking big money from industrial wind companies joined up to pass a bill permitting industrial wind projects to be built all over Maine without valid environmental studies and with no way for local folks to stop them. And one of the two governors then made millions in the wind industry, bought himself a US Senate seat with part of the proceeds, and installed his son at the top of another big welfare wind company.
And now Hawaii’s old nemesis WindPower LLC had dynamited and clearcut all the once-beautiful ridges for miles around Bucky’s and Lexie’s farm and built howling wind turbines fifty-
five stories high – the third-tallest structures in New England – all over them. These steel monstrosities screamed night and day, blotted out the starlit skies and Northern Lights with flashing red strobes, slaughtered thousands of bats and entire flocks of birds, banished tourism and wildlife, made people sick and drove them from their now-valueless homes.
But though there was very little wind and the turbines made almost no electricity, they made billions in taxpayer-paid subsidies for energy companies and investment banks, some of which trickled down to their fully-owned politicians and “environmental” groups.
As I’d learned in previous dealings with WindPower LLC, these turbines did absolutely nothing for global warming. Because wind is so erratic, wind projects must have fulltime fossil fuel plants to back them up, and the result is that wind projects often cause more coal-burning, not less.
And the saddest thing is that these billions of dollars wasted on industrial wind projects could be spent on rooftop solar, substantially reducing CO2 generation and fossil fuel use. But the utilities hate rooftop solar, despite what they pretend, because it cuts their income, so they are avidly trying to curtail it.
“The cows stopped giving milk,” Lexie said, a catch in her throat. “They got spooky and started fighting. We went from eight hundred twenty gallons a day to five hundred, then two hundred, then thirty.” She cleared her throat. “Can you imagine? From eight hundred twenty gallons down to thirty?”
“I can imagine.” It was disheartening that this had been happening in Maine while in Hawaii I’d been hunting and being hunted by Sylvia’s killers – WindPower LLC and the rest of the Wind Mafia, like I explained you in that other book.
“We sold all the cows at Bangor State Fair,” she said. “For almost nothing. At night we took sleeping pills and still couldn’t sleep.”
“So why the fuck’s Bucky in jail –”
“One night he couldn’t stand it anymore…we both had screaming headaches…He took a rifle up the hill and shot out three turbines.”
“Hell, Lexie, everyone should do that.”
“When the cops asked him did he do it, well, you know Bucky – he won’t lie – he said of course he did, and here’s why, but they didn’t care about the here’s why and what those damn turbines are doing to everyone –” She tried to laugh, “So WindPower sued us for ten million dollars.”
I was getting mad. “For them that’s nothing, compared to their pocket money.”
“Pocket money?”
“The thirty percent of total project cost they get up front from the Obama administration, before they even do a thing.”
“So I put a second mortgage on the farm, for Bucky’s bail.”
“How much?”
She said nothing, then, “Fifty thousand.”
Now I was furious. “Look, Lexie, I’ll come back there and shoot out all the other turbines for you. I’ll get some of our Special Forces buddies, we’ll shoot out every damn turbine in Maine –”
“This farm has been in Bucky’s family twelve generations. Since 1781. But the noise and stress from the wind turbines is so bad we have to move. But we can’t afford to buy another farm because now this place is worthless – nobody can live here.”
“This is dreadful…”
“Wait, Pono – it’s much worse.”
“Worse? How worse can it get?”
“While Bucky was out on bail, somebody shot a guy, and the cops say it was Bucky.”
“What guy?”
“Some environmentalist –”
“Bucky’d never do that.”
“After he shot out the turbines he hid the rifle in the woods. But the cops say the bullets from the turbines match the one that killed that guy.”
“Oh Jesus,” I sat down. “Who’s got the rifle?”
“Bucky went back for it but it was gone.”
BEYOND MY LANAI the Oahu wind had cooled. Fifteen minutes ago I’d had the perfect life. Surfer News was sending me to cover the Tahiti Tsunami, one of surfing’s greatest festivals, in six weeks. I was happily in love with three women, Kim a gorgeous married cop who had once put me Inside then freed me, Charity a wild New Zealand adventuress, and Angie who loved and hated me lustfully. The three sexiest things about a woman are kindness, honesty and brains, and they all had them in abundance. Plus there were all the other magnificent women a surfer’s life will bring you.
After two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, plus two undeserved prison sentences, plus hunting down and nearly being killed by Sylvia’s killers, I’d planned to surf, teach foster kids how to do it, help out disabled vets wherever I could, and peacefully contemplate the mysteries of the universe.
A Black Witch moth fluttered down from the gutter and landed on my wrist. Huge and batlike with incandescent red eyes. In Mexico they’re called mariposa de muerte – butterfly of death. In Hawaii we say when the Black Witch comes it’s the soul of a loved one saying goodbye.
Sure I loved Lexie but we’d lost each other. And Bucky I could barely stand.
So who else was going to die?
Max Security
IT WAS AN ICE-CRAGGED RIDGE at night at 10,600 feet in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush, “Death Mountains”. Though we didn’t yet know it, we Americans were just the latest of a long line of invaders who’d come here to die.
West-facing, very steep with some junipers and goat-gnawed scrub, it rose toward a black peak called Bandakur. We were moving along it in staggered vertical formation toward what on aerial observation had seemed a stone barn with a lot of foot traffic, most of it armed.
21:20, thirty below, pale moonlight on white snow and black rock. The icy wind ate into your lungs like acid but felt good too, galactic and liberating, closer to the frigid core of space. Gave you a heightened awareness – at any instant a bullet can smash through you – but it was also the cold heartbeat of the world, this night, this glacial wind, this barren ridge in the Death Mountains.
The stone barn’s slanting stone roof was huddled against the north facing slope. My buddies took positions upslope of the barn while I went forward to listen by a window, as I was the only one who understood some of the local mix of Pashto and Tajik.
Unfortunately there was a lookout in a spider hole we hadn’t been able to see, and he got off a few rounds at me as I dove among the boulders, his bullets whacking past me and howling off the rocks. Then a horrible thud smashed my head and I had a fleeting sense my brain’s blown away and was gone.
What I’ve been told happens next is my buddies waste the spider hole dude but then all these other assholes in the stone barn start laying down a volley of fire.
Amid the deafening bullets I came back to life, instinctively clenching the frozen earth as I tried to understand what I was and what was happening. Then this bearlike beast leaps on me, throws me over his shoulder and sprints uphill through a hail of howling bright splinters and moaning steel and, I remember clearly, tossing me on the frozen earth like a bag of laundry.
My buddies and the Taliban exchanged fire for at least five more minutes – an eternity – as each side maneuvered for position, my buddies soon outflanking the building where the Taliban had retreated to the rear. I’m told the last three Taliban surrendered. The team searched and flex-cuffed them, did a quick recon of the barn and dead Taliban, took the few things of interest and carried me down the ridge for chopper evac.
By then I was half awake and pissed off. Apparently a round had hit my helmet at an angle, bizarrely spun around the back and out the other side. I was later diagnosed to have had a major concussion with significant intracranial bleeding. What I was pissed off about was the roaring pain, the weird noise like sitting next to an F-18 at full blast, the damned dizziness and nausea, the sorrow, and the fact that when the bullets were flying I hadn’t been there for my buddies. And most of all that someone had to risk his life to save me.
Of course his name was Bucky Franklin.
Whose testimony three months later in a militar
y court helped give me a twenty-year sentence.
And who then ran off with the woman I loved. Whom I’d told to forget me.
But more about that later.
IT WAS 88 DEGREES that night when I got on the Delta redeye in Honolulu, and minus 17 when I landed next afternoon in Portland. I didn’t find this funny.
All they had for rentals was a small oil tanker called an Expedition. With me at the helm we launched from the parking garage, steered left at Stroudwater village and moored by a small cemetery on a pine knoll.
The air cut like a knife. Everything was white but the black road, far gray roofs, dark pines and pitted granite slabs in uneven rows up the knoll under the pines. The snow so cold it squeaked as I followed an aisle of graves, careful not to step on anyone, to a cluster of headstones and sat on an icy root. “Long time no see, folks.”
No one answered. Wind whistled through the boughs sifting fogs of tiny crystals down my neck. “I must be nuts,” I added, “coming here in February.”
More silence. “You folks were nuts to even live here,” I said. “At least old Elias had the sense to leave Maine for the Big Island. Do you know how warm it is in Hawaii right now?”
Not a word.
My ass was freezing so I got up and ran a fingertip along a name chiseled in lichened granite. A memorial to Colonel Jonas Hawkins, born 1664, died in the 1690 war in Canada against the French. James Hawkins, killed at the Battle of Saratoga October 7, 1777. Dennis Hawkins in the War of 1812. Women one after the other dead in childbirth, then Sarah Hawkins, a Stroudwater school teacher from 1813 to 1848. Timothy Hawkins, wounded at Little Round Top – the battle where a bunch of kids from Maine died to save Gettysburg and maybe the Union.
The children lay in dated clumps, having died of diphtheria or some other plague, like the man and wife who lost all seven kids in six weeks in 1872. Hawkins grave after Hawkins grave among the pine roots: they who once owned vast tracts of Maine which over the years they’d drunk and gambled away, till an uncle, Jack Hawkins, had nothing left but a 320-acre Stroudwater farm.