I'll be attending the annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Indianapolis in October, and even though The Poacher's Son won't formally be published by Minotaur Books until April 27, 2010 (mark your calendars now), I expect to meet a few people who have read advance galleys of the novel. If you see a dazed looking guy with a Registered Maine Guide pin wandering through the crowded hotel hallways, it's probably yours truly. Either that or it's film director David Fincher who has the unmitigated gall to somewhat resemble me. Tell him I enjoyed Zodiac, will you?
Flooded Flagstaff
Over at my day job we have a reminiscence by writer Jane Lamb about her experiences as a schoolteacher in Flagstaff, one of Maine's lost towns, during the 1940s.
In 1949 the Central Maine Power Company (CMP) began building a dam at Long Falls on the Dead River in order to create a large, manmade lake north of the Bigelow Mountains. CMP wanted to generate hydroelectric power, and it needed this dam so it could release regular, controlled flows of water out of the impoundment to turn its electrical turbines downstream on the Kennebec River. Unfortunately for the residents of two villages that happened to be located in the Dead River valley, this massive public works project also involved the wholesale destruction of their communities. In 1949 the residents of Flagstaff and Dead River Plantation were evacuated. Their homes and businesses were relocated or burned to the ground. And within a few short months, these historic townships—founded by Benedict Arnold himself—were literally washed off the Maine map.
In The Poacher's Son I've taken the artistic liberty of raising the sunken villages from the bottom of Flagstaff Lake and restored them to dry land as if nothing had ever happened to them. One of the themes of the book is dislocation, and the story of Flagstaff's flooding had special resonance for me as I contemplated the many sweeping changes currently taking place in the Maine North Woods.
Jane's essay offers some interesting insights into what it felt like to come of age in a town that no longer exists. You should read it.
Plum Creek Gets the Green Light
Maine's Land Use Regulation Committee, affectionately known in these parts as LURC, is recommending a controversial proposal by Plum Creek Timber to create the largest residential development in Maine history. This decision follows four years of heating public hearings, plans and counter plans, and dozens of newspaper and magazine op-eds. The Plum Creek proposal will develop a thousand house lots and create two large resorts on the shores of Moosehead Lake. The plan also protects thousands of acres in the region under conservation easements—although it keeps them as working forest. I have misgivings about the economic benefits Plum Creek is actually going to bring to the depressed area around Greenville (the thousand houses will certainly sell, but I doubt those resorts are going to prosper), but I'd be happy to be proven wrong since the development is now likely to move forward. I expect lawsuits to slow things down—and I won't be surprised if EarthFirst stirs up some mischief—but in the end Plum Creek will have its way. Watching this process unfold has been an eerie experience for me since it resembles, in many ways, the scenario I wrote about in The Poacher's Son. I hope in real life the outcome is less violent.
Missing Moose
My wife Kristen and I are spending the Labor Day Weekend in Greenville on the shores of Moosehead Lake. At 5:30 a.m. this morning our kind hosts at the Lodge at Moosehead Lake arranged a "moose safari" for us. We drove to First West Branch Pond and then paddled through a cold but lifting fog in search of moose.
Alas, the big animals didn't make an appearance for us (they tend to lie low before the annual fall rut, so it was no surprise), but we did see some great birds, including a family of solitary sandpipers (evidently not so solitary after all), a merlin, sharp-shinned hawks, and a young wood duck that rocketed out of a beaver flowage. As Maine natives, Kristen and I have both seen dozens of moose so we were content just to spend the morning in a canoe on a remote North Woods pond taking in the scenery.
Probably the highlight of the trip for me was when our Registered Maine Guide described a bull moose during rutting season as "Bill Clinton with four legs." That was one joke I hadn't heard before.
One True Sentence
"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written."
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast