I spent the past three nights up near the Quebec border with good friends on a combination turkey hunting trip (no luck) and smelt fishing trip (the spring creeks were thick with them). Inevitably I am now exhausted, but I came back with loads of good ideas for Down East articles, future Mike Bowditch stories, and that general uplift in spirits that always follows a visit to the North Woods. Saw lots of very healthy looking moose and deer. Evening grosbeaks, too.
Moose Calling Contest
My friend, Greg Drummond, was a finalist at yesterday's first World Championship Moose Calling Invitational in Oquossoc, Maine. Greg is a Master Maine Guide and probably the finest outdoorsman I know. He runs Claybrook Mountain Lodge in Highland Plantation with his lovely wife Pat, and he is responsible for many of the nature details you'll find in my books. I wish I'd had the good sense to head over to the Rangeley Lakes for this amusing event—especially since it might have helped hone my own sorry moose-calling skills—but congratulations to Greg on making it to the finals.
Moose Bones
My wife and I went birding today in the woods near Weskeag marsh (the real place that inspired the tidal creek where Mike Bowdich lives in The Poacher's Son and Trespasser) and we came across the partial skeleton of a moose. The bones had been picked clean. They had obviously been there a while.
Stereotypes
People think that all of us Mainers are lumberjacks and lobsterman; we eat clam chowder for breakfast and pepper our sentences with "wicked"; we call moose, dress in shiny yellow sou'westers, bury our cats in pet semataries; all of us wear Bean Boots; trade dry one liners about not getting from there to here down at the variety store; live in quaint little cottages by the sea with views of pointed firs and Mount Cadillac rising in the distance; have a weird fetish for moderate Republican female senators; drink maple syrup straight from the tree; spend our Sundays locked in life and death curling matches; talk like a bad actors doing a bad version of a Down East accent; ayuh.
Having said that, here I am curling.
Update on 2011-01-19 12:18 by Paul Doiron
My Bean Boots are upstairs.
The Boulder Field
It's a week early for some reason, but I have a new editor's note up over at the day job. My subjects this month are, in no particular order, the auguries of Henry David Thoreau, the brilliance of Bernd Heinrich, the melancholy that comes from anticipating a profound loss, and a bittersweet trip I recently took with my two nephews to the Maine North Woods.