Notes from Maine - 2021/07/04

Chilly, rainy, and cloudy—we’re having a quiet Fourth of July here. Last night, the fireworks in the distance sounded almost like thunder. Several of the little towns around here have their fireworks displays on the 2nd or 3rd, or even 5th. They’re spread out, I suppose so people can go visit different events? 

When I lived up in Belgrade, they had the fireworks over one of the lakes. One year, my father and I climbed into the little aluminum boat and had a nice sunset cruise up to the big lake where we parked out of the way and let the boat drift as we swatted mosquitoes. When the fireworks started, it was like nothing I had ever seen or heard. Each giant plume of color was reflected off the water. The sound of each explosion echoed off of Blueberry Hill a second later. With the sky lit up by all the fireworks, we could see all the other boats dotting the surface of the lake. Over on the shore, campfires burned and sparklers hovered above the ground as kids ran around with them. We could hear the faint sound of the Star-Spangled Banner from speakers in the window of Day’s store. 

I was in my twenties the first time we saw the fireworks from the lake, but I felt like a kid. Despite the mosquitoes, it was magical. Growing up in Northern Virginia, we would sit on the bank of the Potomac and watch the fireworks of DC over the Washington Monument. Those were epic—on a completely different scale—but impersonal and distant. In Belgrade, sitting in the tiny boat, my father and I were immersed in the experience. When the last missile exploded, we discovered that we had made a grave mistake.

Lights came on across the lake and boats began to chug back towards their docks. We had a long way to go in the little boat. My grandparents’ dock was all the way down at the other end of the stream. At noon, with the 8.5hp outboard running at full speed, it might take thirty minutes to get home. But this was night, the lake was congested with tons of traffic, and we had just realized that our boat had no lights whatsoever. There were no headlights, running lights, or even reflectors. We were far from home and, aside from the lights of the other boats, it was pitch black out.

We had a brief, whispered debate.

Should we wait for everyone else to disperse? If we did, we would only have the lights from camps to tell us where shore was. There was no moon. Our only chance to find the channel was to follow the lights of the other boats. Between the upper and lower lakes on Long Pond, there’s a tight squeeze where you pass under the bridge at Castle Island. The channel is marked with red and green buoys, but no lights. Big rocks lie in wait, just under the surface beyond those buoys. They’ve claimed a million boat propellors over the years, and more than one from our family.

My father steered close to the shore and I perched in the bow of the boat, whispering back advice as the two of us fumbled through the dark. The engine purred at its lowest possible speed. The loudest sound we made was our constant slapping of mosquitoes who thrived above the shallow water. Even worse than shattering the propellor would be the embarrassment if we were spotted by anyone we knew. A few spotlights from other boats swung across us and we heard gasps from those people. Maybe they thought we were ghosts, slipping through the night, or maybe they were just appalled by our blind boating.

Navigating the channel at Castle Island was the worst part. We had to merge into the traffic and listen to the disparaging comments from adjacent captains. Somehow, we made it through and my father steered for deep water. Once we were in the lower lake, he could almost find his way home with his eyes closed. That was pretty much necessary too. The other traffic disappeared quickly. People found their docks, tied up, and went into their camps to crack a beer and listen to the haunting wails of the loons. 

We crossed that deep water at a snail’s pace, seeing nothing but stars above and the black silhouette of distant hills. We floated on darkness. Heading south, we eventually hit the weeds in the shallows near the shore. My father veered to port and found the place where the lake turned into the stream. We knew each turn by the camps that glowed in the darkness. First, we passed the Biddescomb’s camp. That camp was built by Vint Dunn and was one of the first camps on the lake. He also built a white house on the top of the hill of Dunn road. Each fall, Vint would press cider from his apple trees and put it in a big cask down cellar in that white house. When his son, Dick Dunn, was a youngster, he would hide down in the cellar when his father would have poker parties in the kitchen. Dick later admitted that when he had to pee, he would pee into the cask of hard cider so he wouldn’t be discovered.

We passed the camp of the Hazards, the Jancovics, and “The Shanty” built by Happy and Babe Rice. Once we rounded that final corner of the stream, I let out a relieved sigh. If I had to, I could have swum back to the dock from there. My father killed the engine and the boat bumped into position next to the dock. We tied it up and walked back up to the house in the dark. 

When we returned, my grandmother asked, “How was it? Uneventful?”

I started to tell her how much fun it was and she closed her book on her finger to keep her place and listened for a bit. Eventually, my story petered out and she filled the silence with one of hers. She had the best stories. I knew them all by heart, but I always liked to hear them again. I think she told me the one about how Dick Dunn’s car caught on fire when he was driving home with a trunk full of ammunition. That was a great one. Dick ended up crouching in a ditch as bullets exploded in his car. He would have run off to call the police except there was a police officer crouched right next to him in the ditch. Neither one of them thought that they would be accidentally shot by the burning vehicle, but neither were willing to take the chance.

Or, maybe she told me the story about the one-armed elevator operator at the Colorado hotel in the snow storm. That was a great story too.

We never took that little boat up to the lake to see the fireworks again. It had been a wondrous experiment, but not one that needed repeating.