The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My grandfather on my mom’s side was a potato farmer all his life in Northern Maine a few miles from the Canadian border. Folks think of Maine, they think the rocky coast of the Atlantic, they conjure up white clapboard houses in a quaint bay, they think lobsters. His fields were rocky, all right, but the ocean was nowhere to be heard. In the winter, though, he had waves of snowdrift piling onto his snowfences that didn’t abate until late into the spring. By May or so he could start plowing that year’s crop. No lobsters migrated up toward his fields and the houses were anything but Norman Rockwell quaint.

Until the day he died, he plowed his fields with a horse, not a tractor. All the other farmers up there in Aroostook County moved into the 20th Century soon as they could get a loan for one of those newfangled Farmall tractors, but not my grandfather, no siree, he had his trusty horse Sarah and he stuck with her til the bitter end. Hard life, spud farming in rocky ground, harder yet working with a horse and harness. Give the man credit, he was a stubborn old codger. When we visited each summer, he’d take us grandkids for a ride in his ‘caddy’, an old battered Chevy that he drove the whole quarter mile into town on U.S. 1 where he’d pick up feed or just shoot the breeze with the other farmers gathered at the grocery or the mill. Small town life, talking weather, catching up on gossip, complaining about the price of a barrel of potatoes. How’s your garden doing? Hear about the Godfrey kid? Randall farm hit with blight, probably lose half his crop. Too much rain, too little rain, no rain at all.

You better believe us kids could never, not in a thousand lifetimes, imagine living in a small town or working outside on a rundown played-out farm. So how was it I found myself 20 years later buying a shack on logged off acreage at the butt end of an island that basically was its own small town? ‘Crazy world’, my 97 year old father likes to say every day when I call, as if that sums up anything and everything inexplicable. If I had a better explanation, I’d let you know, but I don’t.

The other day I was hauling in wood for the stove and got to reminiscing about Grampy, this tired out old North Woods farmer who sat in the evenings in his favorite rocker smoking his pipe, the man who plowed with horses in the late 20th Century, barely made a living, raised a family in hard times, worked til he dropped. The mizzus asked the other day why I don’t quit hauling firewood, just get a propane stove, sell off the 30 cords in the woodsheds and make life easier for myself. And her too, I suspect.

Crazy world, I could have said, but didn’t. But I think I understand in some vague way the need to hang onto the old ways even if life is harder for it. Hard isn’t the worst thing in the world but it does keep you in it. The ground anyway, probably quicker than I’d like.

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