Welcome to the Dark Side

I'm a little late to this story, but I want to give a shout out to Malcom Jones' well-observed Newsweek piece on literary writers who "go slumming" by writing detective novels. This summer, it's been Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon who have tried on trenchcoats, but Jones notes that some of America's canonical authors (Faulkner, Dreiser) have dabbled in noir over the years. What these literary authors discovered, says Jones, is that writing an exceptional mystery is no easy task:

So what happens when mainstream novelists tackle noir? More often than not, they find it's harder than it looks. Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance contains some brilliant passages, but mostly it's a mess (paradoxically, when Mailer took on real crime in The Executioner's Song, he wrote arguably his best book). McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is also occasionally wonderful, but it might be his worst novel—who would have thought that we would ever accuse him of sounding preachy?

I agree with Jones about Mailer but not about McCarthy. That said, I read No Country for Old Men after seeing the film, and I think the book probably benefited from the vivid memory of Javier Bardem's perfectly rendered Anton Chigurh.

Berry Season

My wife Kristen Lindquist, who works as the development director for Coastal Mountains Land Trust, writes a monthly natural history calendar that's published in our local newspaper. She a far better writer than I am about Maine's natural world, as I think you'll discover if you read this. There's an archive of Kristen's essays posted at the land trust's Web site. I recommend especially the one about the mice.

A Trapper's Guide to Home Dentistry

Bob Wagg was a larger than life Maine trapper who used to frequent the area around Spencer Lake and The Forks back in the 1970s (he was a regular fixture at Berry's Store, too). He was also the unlikely star of one of my favorite documentaries, Dead River Rough Cut — about which I'll write more later. But if you want to meet the kind of North Maine woodsman who's largely gone extinct (for better and worse, some might say), this clip from the movie is pure Wagg.

Maine Guide Tip

Every week I'll offer some wood wisdom gleaned from Registered Maine Guides I've known.

The King of Knots

When I was a Boy Scout, I never got my knot-tying merit badge. Something about ropes and strings befuddled me. I could barely tie my shoelaces, which was strange because I was otherwise a pretty smart and dextrous kid. 

It was only as I got older that I learned the value of tying strong knots (I think it was after a mattress went flying off the roof of my car after a haphazard knot I'd tied gave way). And the reality is that you don't really need to know all that many knots to handle most situations in life. But the one knot you absolutely do need to learn is the bowline (pronounced bowlin'). Back when I learned how to tie it, there was no YouTube to help teach me. I had to use a book. These days, though, there are lots of great how-to videos available. The one below is fine. My only complaint — beyond the University of Phoenix ad — is that it doesn't use the old "bunny goes in the hole and around the tree" teaching model.

Bowlines are fun and easy to tie once you get the hang of them. Impress your landlubber friends!

Maine Guide Tip

Every week I'll offer some wood wisdom gleaned from Registered Maine Guides I've known.

The 30/30 Rule

I'm fascinated with lightning for certain personal reasons. On average 58 Americans die a year from being struck, and I think many of those deaths could be prevented if we were better at educating people about the real danger lightning poses and how to act during a thunderstorm. For instance, here's a practical tip: You can gauge your distance from an approaching electrical storm by calculating the interval between a lightning flash and the following thunder. Count the number of seconds between "flash and bang," and then divide by 5. (Sound travels at a rate of roughly one-fifth of a mile per second.) So if you hear thunder 30 seconds after seeing a flash you are within 6 miles of the strike — and that's a very dangerous place to be. Get indoors immediately.

The other part of the 30/30 rule is that you should wait 30 minutes after you last heard thunder before you continue your round of golf or venture back out on the lake.

The National Weather Service has some useful and interesting information about lightning here.