Falling In Love With Maine
by Ralph Larsen as told to Burndett Andres
September, 2003
In the autumn of 1946, I was
fifteen years old, about five feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than a
hundred pounds. I had lived in foster
homes under the aegis of Catholic Charities for more than a decade and got into
a lot of scrapes because I was a “home kid.”
I also got into scrapes with bullies.
They didn’t pick on me because I was a home kid; like all bullies, they
picked on me because I was small and not so good at defending myself. I was little for my age; I was really cute,
with black curls and the girls loved me, but I was a shrimp.
I had picked up a slim volume,
probably in the candy shop or the drug store, about a number of sports
figures. One of them was Jack
Dempsey. When his trainer, Doc Kearns,
had wanted to toughen up Dempsey’s hands he had taken him to a lumber camp; he
said there was no better place to toughen up.
I wanted to get tough fast, so I decided to take a page out of this
book, so to speak.
My brother Johnny and I were living
with the McAllisters on Long Island at the time, in Howard Beach, on a canal
that went out to Jamaica Bay. Our house
was built on pilings right at the water’s edge; at high tide we could dive out
the second story windows into the water.
We were dirt poor, but so was everyone around us, so we didn’t really
know it. My foster mother had just died
and there was no one else around who cared if I stayed in school or not, so one
day I just packed up an old cardboard satchel I’d found in the house, said
good-bye to my brother and left. I was
heading to Maine to be a lumberjack.
I don’t remember what I took with
me. A shirt perhaps. Some underwear, I guess. Everything I owned would have fit in that
satchel. I had my hunting knife for
protection. Mr. McAllister was a truck
driver and managed to get our clothes from the U.S. Army at Fort Hamilton by
one means or another, so I imagine I was wearing my olive drab Eisenhower
jacket and I surely would have had on my paratrooper boots with high tops and
laces. I was very proud of those boots;
they were very macho and considered to be quite a trophy at a time when I had
precious few trophies of any kind.
I had a little money from caddying
at the North Hills and the Glen Oaks Country Clubs and from doing odd jobs,
raking leaves and such, and I believe I must have taken a Greyhound bus to
Bangor, or perhaps to Portland and then hitchhiked the rest of the way to Bangor. I really don’t remember how I got there; it
was fifty-seven years ago. I do remember
inquiring around about where to apply for work and being told to go home, that
the only work available for kids in a lumber camp was sweeping out shacks and
such. Well, I hadn’t come up here to
clean house, so I started hitchhiking south.
I remember walking along country
roads and getting rides for a few miles off and on. They were all country roads; I didn’t have a
map, so I don’t know exactly where I was.
I know I was out of money; I had expected to get a job so hadn’t allowed
money for getting home. I subsisted
entirely on apples for a couple of days.
The trees where I walked were laden with them. They were so crisp; I remember the snap when
I bit into them and the juice running down my chin. I often think of that experience at harvest
time as they spoiled me for apples forever; store bought apples are unbearable
by comparison and the farther removed in time the experience becomes, the
greater the difference seems to grow.
A few times I stopped at
farmhouses. “I’m hungry,” I would say
and the woman of the house would take pity on me and give me some cookies and a
glass of milk. Like I said, I was a cute
kid. I don’t remember getting a meal
although I might have done. I slept in
the fields in the grass; the air was so cool and fresh. One sunny afternoon, I remember just lying
down in a field by the roadside and taking a nap. You could do that then.
I remember sitting on a hill
somewhere along the coast, under some pine trees, just gazing in awe at the
crashing surf and the jagged shoreline covered with evergreens right down to
the water’s edge. That sight is etched
in my mind till this day, even though I don’t know exactly where it was.
By the time I got to Portland, I
was dead broke and very hungry. I hung
around, looked around and walked around, trying to nose out some sort of
lumber jacking connection. When the
hunger got beyond bearing I would go to this little drugstore/luncheonette in
Congress Square and order a hamburger.
After I ate, I’d go into the bathroom and crawl out the window. Hamburgers were five cents then and I didn’t
even have the five cents. Some
indication of how hungry I was can be gleaned from the fact that I had the nerve
to go back there more than once. Looking
back, I think the waitress must have liked me because she never squealed and a
few times she gave me pie and coffee, too.
When I finally accepted the fact
that I was not going to become a lumberjack, I decided to return to New
York. I started hitchhiking again and
got a ride just south of Portland. The
driver dropped me off in a little coastal village. It was late at night and only one street lamp
eerily penetrated the fog. I remember
walking to the water’s edge and sleeping there that night huddled up against
some building. I’ve always called that
place Wales by the Sea, but since there is no such town on the coast (or
anywhere else for that matter), I have come to believe it must have been Wells
Beach.
The next day I got a ride with a
trucker into Boston. I remember being
outside Fenway Park that night; the Red Sox were playing St. Louis in the 1946
World Series. I eventually hitchhiked
back to New York. The truckers loved me
because I helped keep them awake; I never shut up. I grew another foot before all was said and
done, got into weight lifting, personal training and even some professional
boxing and ceased being a target for bullies.
I have vacationed in the state many
times over the years and finally moved to Cherryfield in 2002 at the age of
seventy-one, because I fell in love with Maine in the autumn of ’46 and never
did get over it.
Originally Published in the Downeast Coastal Press of October 14-20, 2003
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