He Walked In The Shadows-With Reflection On The 2015 Maine Peace Walk In Mind
“Yeah, the whole freaking thing is going from Ellsworth up by Bar Harbor down to the big naval shipyard at Portsmouth something like 175 miles along old Route One from October 9th to the 24th with many stops along the way and I am going to pick up the caravan at Freeport, up in L.L. Bean land, on the 19th,” Sam Lowell chanted into the cellphone to his longtime companion Laura Perkins when she asked him if he wanted to go to New York City with her on a lark. Sam had just heard about the journey a few days before after the regular monthly meeting of his organization, Veterans for Peace, the Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter Nine out of Boston which he had been a member of for the previous several years and which was one of the co-sponsors of what had been called the Maine Peace Walk To Save The Seas, or something like that depending on which leaflet you looked at.
This year’s theme was the demilitarization of the seas, a subject close to his heart as a life-long ocean maniac (not Mainiac although he had been going to the coast of Maine for the previous fifty years or so he could not claim that designation as a real born and bred Mainaic had gone to great pains to tell him a few years back when he jokingly said he should be considered a Mainiac since he had not been born there, nor had his parents). Maine’ coastline had seen the ravages of climate change most noticeably by the serious erosion of the beloved beaches as the Arctic ice cap continues to melt. The military’s contribution had been deemed the number one pollution problem with the seas including the construction of ships at both the Bath Iron Works and repair and outfitting at the Portsmouth Naval Base (for those purists the entrance to the Naval Base is in Kittery in Maine). So a number of groups led by the Maine Veterans for Peace were staging a walk from Ellsworth to Portsmouth over sixteen days in mid-October to bring focused public attention to the issue, or rather issues since along with the effects of climate change, industrial-sized pollution the fate of much of the sea life in the Atlantic (Pacific too but Atlantic on this side of the continent) from various testing projects done by the Navy.
So yes he was in, in for the politics, in for the anti-war, anti-military aspects of the adventure. In too for the hard facts that this would be an ocean-centered walk and as he (and Laura with a grimace at times) would be the first to tell you he was an ocean man through and through since he had been practically wrapped in swaddling clothes at birth near the ocean and had generally lived close enough to beaches all his life as a matter of preference (he would always make people laugh when he told them do anything at all but don’t bury him in Kansas, out in Toto and Dorothy land) and for the fact that it was Maine where he had over time spent most of his ocean time. So it was an easy sell. He had asked Laura, Laura the one with the grimace when the question came up, if she wanted to go but she nixed that idea and said she much preferred the “civilized” environs of New York City in all its false glitter to the thought of walking the woe-begotten roads of Maine.
Sam had decided once he had made his commitment to go to pick the walking caravan up in Freeport, about twenty miles from Portland a place where in recent years he had gone on business and Freeport a place he was familiar with from various trips to L.L. Bean the outdoors fitting company that had made that town famous over the years. Although the walk started in Ellsworth he felt that the distance was too far from Boston to traverse easily since that would be a six hour drive up. He also could not make commitment to a whole sixteen days, who could do so except renegade outlaw poets (a real case as he found out on the walk but better left unspoken about for other reasons), task-driven organizers of such walks as symbolic speech (Sam found out there is a whole sub-culture of peace walkers crisscrossing the country mainly led by Buddhists or Buddhist-inspired activists), nature freaks (you walking forlornly in the country, rucksack on back, ready to stop and sleep anywhere off some beaten road with bedroll in hand like he himself had done in his youth, once) and passionate advocates for the sea-life of the world. But the biggest issue was whether he at seventy-two could force the pace for more than the five days it would take to get from Freeport to Portsmouth since he had the usual age-related assortment of physical problems that would impede his ability to finish the march. And so Freeport on the eleventh day of the walk it was.
Sam had originally intended to take a couple of fellow VFPers up with him late Sunday afternoon when the caravan had finished up its leg from Brunswick, the home of Bowdoin College (the day‘s walkers meeting at the monument to the great Civil War general and Bowdoin professor Joshua Chamberlain and his heroic Maine regiment who were critical to the victory at Gettysburg) to Freeport. The idea was to get there in time for the pot luck supper that each host site provided along the way and the nightly lecture and entertainment program in order to get the feel of who had marched, how long, and the reception along the way. Walk solidarity. That fell through when the two aged men felt that they could not physically handle the leg from Freeport to Portland a distance of eighteen miles and then the next day’s sixteen miles from Portland to Saco before returning to Boston with another VFPer headed down there after that walk.
So Sam had decided to drive up early Monday morning and meet the walkers as they prepared to leave the Congregational church that that had hosted them that night. (A quick scan of the pot luck and program itinerary that he had received from the main organizer when he had committed to go showed that the bulk of the places were churches, churches like the UCC, Congregational and U/U which had a tradition of being on the right side of the angels in these matters.) He got to Freeport without incident and met the walkers most of whom he would be with for the next several days. Nice morning a little cool but good enough for walking in mid-October. Since he was among the few who had brought cars that day was the first of what became a regular procedure of shuttling cars forward and then to be brought back to the line of march via the indiscernible van rented for the purpose as well as storage area for provisions and as a ride for those who could not walk the day’s full distance(sometimes the van would return to the place where the day’s march was scheduled to start, sometimes the marchers would had eagerly started walking and they would catch up to them on the route).That ever dependable supply van (with kudos to its ever dependable jack-of-all-trades driver) festively draped with a huge poster calling on the American government (and by extension all governments) to demilitarize the seas, in short, to aid in climate change control, in defense of the sea-life harmed by man’s wayward and uncaring use of the ocean’s environment and really the lynchpin of the whole effort to abolish war as an instrument of state policy.
The poster’s design by Roger Cray a talented artist from northern Maine who had a passion to save the sea-life that hovered off the shores near where he lived showed a battery of war vessels, destroyers, cruisers and the like doing their best to pollute and cause aural harm to the sea-life below represented by whales, dolphins and the schools of fish and other sea mammals who swim in their wake. A very impression visual plea and advertisement for the purpose of the march and which was subject to a fair amount of camera snapshots and a “hook” for media coverage. Atop that van sat (or maybe virtual reality “swan”) was another Cray creation, a papier mache replica of a dolphin which he had securely welded to the top of the van. That symbol spoke for itself.
Ironically the van driver, Jack Malloy, had been a walker who had started in Ellsworth but who by the time the walk arrived in Bath for a break the previous Friday had been hobbling requiring crutches and so he volunteered his services as a driver. A driver who would prove to be invaluable for many things but most importantly for always being at various pull-offs to encourage walkers along, something necessary on long walk days when energies flagged.
Sam was not a religious man, hadn’t thought much about any correlation between religion and political life since the days of his youth when he was tied down to the Catholic Church and its strange doctrines which had taken him a long time to fully break from as he busted out a political trajectory to the left, to the “side of the angels” that the priests in the lecterns kept mentioning on Sunday but who paid scant attention to the rest of the week. Although he had subsequently worked, especially in recent years when the remnants of the streets anti-war struggle required such efforts, with Quakers, Shakers, and all the social activist circles in Protestant church-dom, he had inured himself to any religious tendencies. As they stood outside the Universalist/Unitarian Church in Freeport that morning waiting to form up he was surprised when Brian asked everybody to form what he called the “circle.” The idea of the circle as he inquired about its meaning later to a former minister whom he knew through VFP and who had studied in Asia was a Buddhist concept about the one-ness of all things, all life not just human life. Then a Buddhist nun (like a Catholic nun he presumed subordinate to the male monks of the religion) dressed in her ceremonial garb began a ritualistic chant while another walker hit the paddle drum to a steady beat that would become an important pacing beat and concluded her chant with a bowing of the head. Others not in grab and not Asian he noticed also chanted and almost all universally bowed at the end. The circle of life, the drum beat (and the precise and correct way to produce it which had been haphazard early on in the walk before he came aboard as that ex-minister was at pains to tell him) and the whole Eastern theological construction of Buddhism shadowed the walk as it progressed from town to town.
Sam thought that it was ironic that just the week before he had been up in Lowell to attend a Jack Kerouac commemoration during Columbus Day weekend at the park near the old mills where he is so honored by a number of granite pillars with passages from his various works and among them something from his Buddhist influenced days. He would have to check with that old “on to the rod” defrocked mad man Catholic shiva saint bastard on his cosmic karma take on the matter when he got home. In any case while not overtly disdainful as he much have been in his more fighting secular youth when he was trying to break the back of his Catholic past he stood ramrod straight whenever the ceremony was performed which was at the start of the day, at the beginning of each break and at the end of the day’s walk.
(That Protestant social activist designation in his chats with others or in speeches delivered at ant-war rallies and other such events would go by the moniker the “U/U circuit,” whatever denomination was sponsoring an event at its facilities since at least in the remnant “1960s folk minute monthly coffeehouse circuit” and gathering places for planning events or having a forum if you asked where the event was to be held a great majority of the time it would be a Universalist/Unitarian church. A look at the pot luck, program and sleeping arrangements list confirmed the continuing truth of that designation.)
And so the peace caravan walked down Route One (the whole route was with few exception along that old time when-the- pace-was-slower-and- people-liked-to-stop-along-the-road north-south American highway included the stopping places for the day) walked until the first break stop (complete with Buddhist nun-led ceremonial chant and bow before breaking) when he accidently turned his head to introduce himself to those next to him and there she was. Sally Rich, the Quaker girl from his old anti-war GI coffeehouse days after he had been discharged from the Army at Fort Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts about forty miles northwest of Boston. Yeah, Sally who had help organize all those rallies in front of Fort Devens calling for his freedom and whom his had had a half serious crush on in those days (although that sentiment was probably true of half the women he met then since he had been in the process of being divorced from his first wife and was “free as a bird” to play the field).
Sally whom he had gone down in Washington with on fateful May Day, 1971 both of them to be arrested that day he with a group of radical anti-war veterans and she with a Quaker contingent (fateful as he later determined that for him at least that day and the events that occurred that day and those immediately after that week proved to be the high water mark of what he would always call the search “for the newer world” that the English poet Tennyson spoke of and that subsequently they, the forces for the newer world, the kids who had been washed by the counter-cultural climate of the times and though they had turned a corner would be fighting a forty plus year rearguard action that is still with us). Sam had not seen her since shortly after that time, maybe a year after, maybe late 1972 since he had drifted off with a friend of hers whom he had also had half a crush on which turned into an affair. Sam and Sally shook hands profusely and started rattling off shared events from back then. They chatted for a bit and then Brian’s inevitable call to form up came and so they marched along that mostly tree-lined part of the road on the way to Cumberland for lunch at the Friends School.
That meeting had not been completely fortuitous on Sam’s part (like a great many things in his life) since he had noticed that on the Pot Luck and Program schedule Brian had sent him by e-mail once he contacted Brian to tell him he would walk but was not initially sure where he would pick up the walk that one of the contacts for the Freeport section of the walk was Sally Rich. Now there are probably many Sally Riches in the world but here are the clues that identified her as probably being his Sally; (1) he knew that they last he had heard from her that Sally was headed to Maine to get out of the freaking city (her term since Quakers don’t as a rule swear); and, (2) the lunch break that day was to be at the Friends School in Cumberland (Quaker-run and majority Quaker teachers but open to all others). So he had chosen Freeport as his start point in some expectation of seeing if that was his Sally. He had assumed when he did not see her in Freeport that she was not walking and that was that. What he didn’t know was that she and her husband (a teacher at the Friends School) lived alone Route One in Freeport and she had joined the walk there. (As it turned out he also knew her husband, Jonah, since they and that girlfriend of Sally’s and Sam had gone down to New York City together one weekend and stayed at her family’s place in Ardley-on-Hudson just up the road from the city.)
At lunch Sam and Sally after selecting their food from the wholesome and varied ad hoc buffet sat together at a round table in the meeting room the Friends had set aside for the walkers with about six other people, a couple of them VFPers when Sally told her version of the story of their surprise meeting that day and of how they had known each other in the old days from when Sally was organizing rallies at Fort Devens to free Sam. That statement sparked a startled response from the others who asked what the whole story was. Asked Sam to tell his story since Sally had already given the basic details of how she and a couple of friends who were interested anti-war soldier work had heard about a Private Lowell who had while stationed at Fort Devens had refused to wear the Army uniform and was facing serious charges because of it from somebody at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the social action arm of the Quakers, where Sam had gotten counselling on how to apply for conscientious objector (CO) status in the military and later some legal help when he needed it.
Here is what Sam had to tell his attentive co-walkers most of whom had been involved somehow, somewhere in the anti-Vietnam War movement which had begun their active oppositional careers:
“You know I haven’t told this story in years, haven’t had to since the draft went down in flames back in the 1970s and except for people like most of you, people who won their spurs in the peace movement way back in the 1960s, maybe before, there had been not need to tell it. It really is the story of why almost fifty years later I am pounding the bloody pavements of Maine something I would probably not be doing if the fates had worked otherwise. Certainly I would not use the story, most of it anyway, if we were out counter-recruiting in the high schools because with the volunteer military it would go over their heads. But you can relate to this story because you, somebody you know, or knew, some guy anyway back then had to face the draft and what to do, or not do about it.
Now I was a college student back in Boston in the mid-1960s as the crescendo of anti-Vietnam War activity came through the campuses and so I was vaguely anti-war, probably as much as any Boston college student but not actively. Strangely on that issue I was kind of behind the curb since on social issues; the war on poverty, civil rights in the South which meant black civil rights, abolition of capital punishment, and nuclear disarmament I was well left of center, left of Bobby Kennedy my political hero then whom I worked for that fateful spring of 1968 until he was assassinated. I wasn’t into draft resistance, street protests, that kind of thing although I wasn’t hostile to any such efforts. Mostly though I was interested in my girlfriend, having sex, doing a little drugs, not much by the standards of the day but enough, going to rock concerts and letting tomorrow take care of itself, stuff like that and working for candidates like Bobby who were in the system since I wanted my own Democratic Party career, something like that.
After graduation I had planned to go to law school as a way to put off the draft question that as the escalations in Vietnam continued and as the American body count got larger I started to focus on a bit more. Especially since by 1968 the need for ground troops was growing faster than guys were volunteering or being dragooned by their National Guard units into active service and they were no longer exempting law school students from the draft. Then in the fall of 1968 I got my notice to appear for a physical and subsequently after successfully completing that physical I got my notice to report to the Boston Army Base for induction.
Here’s where everything gets tricky though, or really my whole past, who I was, where I came from got me caught in a web. My girlfriend’s brother was in Vietnam, I had come from a family, a working class family where military service was expected, my father was a Marine in World War II and one of my uncles a lifer who would eventually become Sergeant-Major of the Army, the highest enlisted man, a couple of guys on my small street had been killed in Vietnam already so there was no social support for doing anything but take the induction. I wasn’t a CO, I didn’t even consider jail or Canada they were really not even on the radar and so although I had my qualms, maybe fears of getting killed mixed in too, I was inducted in early 1969 and sent to Fort Gordon down in Georgia, Augusta where they play the Masters golf tournament every year.
About three days, maybe four days, in I realized that I had made a very serious mistake, had not thought how contrary to my self-identity that whole basic training scene was. I was getting “religion” on the questions of war and peace very quickly. As the weeks in basic went by I got stronger in my resolve to not go to Vietnam but kept quiet about it since I was in the middle of nowhere with no resources to do anything except eat that rich red Georgia clay we grabbed every day in training. After basic I was assigned to Advanced Infantry Training, AIT, at Fort McClellan in goddam Alabama the die was cast, the noose was getting tighter since the only place for infantry men, grunts, 11 Bravos, cannon fodder was in Vietnam. The only thing I knew was when I got home I was getting some help, some outside help in order to resist orders to Vietnam that were inexorably coming at the end of that training.
After I got my orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transit to Vietnam I got to go home for thirty days on leave before reporting, the standard procedure then but a mistake by the Army in my case. After checking in with my girlfriend who was not sympathetic with my situation and whom I decided to forsake (okay dump) I went to AFSC in Cambridge since although I did not know that much about Quakers I did know that they were historically against war and knew something about CO status. I was counselled there by a guy, I forget his name, do you remember him, Sally, a tall guy with a long ponytail [Sally: no] who laid out some options without telling me what to do but with a wink. What I did was go AWOL for thirty-three days since once you have passed thirty days you are automatically dropped from the rolls of the place you were assigned to they called it. Which meant that those orders to Fort Lewis were no longer in effect since I didn’t belong there at that point. I turned myself in up at Fort Devens, the closest Army post in the area and was put in what they called a Special Detachment Unit (SPD), a unit for AWOLs and other problem children after I told them I wanted to put in for CO status.
Now in those days except for Quakers, religious people with long histories of pacifism, it was hard to get CO status from civilian draft boards much less from the Army although federal court cases were coming through that would help both classes of cases, would help me eventually. So I put in my application, went through the procedure which I won’t go through since while I was termed “sincere” which would also help me later I was turned down. Turned down in the Army meant to get those orders to Vietnam again.
I was not going, no way not after that trial by fire in my head and that is when after a ton of thought I decided that I was going to refuse to wear the uniform at the weekly Monday morning head count, the morning report they called it to see who was in and who was missing, AWOL. I did so also carrying a sign when said “Bring The Troops Home.” Needless to say I was in trouble, deep trouble, deep trouble in the immediate sense because two burly lifer-sergeants tackled me to the ground, handcuffed me and escorted me to the stockade where they put me in solitary for a while I guess to see what kind of monster they had on their hands. I was given what they called a special court martial which was not bad since it meant the maximum they could give me was six months which they did and which I served in full at the Devens stockade. When I was released from the stockade though because of some legal action my civilian attorney provided by AFSC who had gotten before a judge to keep me at Devens I had to go through the whole refusal thing again and again received a six month sentence. Most of which I served.
I have to laugh when I think about it now but I could have endlessly been given six months sentences for refusing to wear the uniform and still been in the stockade or some such place today. That is where the extra civilian legal help came in to save my ass. The key point was that all the Army paperwork said I was sincere so my civilian lawyer, Steve Larkin, who worked out of an office in Central Square in Cambridge and had done a bit of military resistance work previously submitted a writ of habeas corpus to the Federal District Court in Boston stating that I had been “arbitrarily and capriciously,” those words have legal significance, denied my CO status by the Army. Of course as you know the courts take a while to make decisions on anything so I waited in jail for the decision. Steve had said to expect the worse though since the judge in the case was not known for being sympathetic to such cases. What helped was the “sincere” part and the fact that the United States Supreme Court had loosened up the standards for CO status so the judge granted the writ and after few minor delays I was honorably discharged from the Army and told never to return to a military base in this lifetime. I a short time later joined in the anti-war GI resistance work at a coffeehouse outside Fort Devens and later at Fort Dix down in New Jersey. Where Sally and others had come in on my case was to organize rallies at the front gate of the fort against the war and calling for my release. As every political prisoner knows, people like Chelsea Manning today, a case that I have been involved in supporting, that outside public help went a long way toward keeping my spirits up especially after that second court-martial. So again kudos to Sally and the others who came out in support.”
Just then Brian began what would become his common call over the next few days to line up for the next leg of the day’s walk. Sam said. “Any questions see me on the walk or tonight when we get done.”
Sam had purposefully set himself and the VFP flag that he carried for the sections of the walk that he had participated in to be at the back of the line of march. He had privately told himself that he wanted to do so in order to make sure that nobody was left behind, no straggler got too far behind. Strangely this was one of the positive things that he had taken out of his brief Army career, the idea that you do not leave your comrades, your buddies, behind. In his work for the Chelsea Manning defense campaign he had developed a slogan of “we will not leave our sister behind” after the hubbub of the trial and sentencing in August of 2013 had placed the case off the radar in the public consciousness so he extended that idea to the walk. The strange part is that at seventy-two some of the younger walkers, those in their fifties, thought he was a straggler and would come back to see if he was okay.
He had to laugh at least the first time the situation came up since he was a jogger of sorts and thought he was in pretty good shape for an old geezer although at the end of the eighteen mile leg from Freeport to Portland that day he admitted to one and all that he was beat, beat six ways to Sunday, and wound up going to sleep early that night. In any case several walkers worked their ways to the back of the line to ask him specific questions about his Army time and Sally came back to chat a bit but mostly into Portland he looked around at the scenery which he had passed many times before on this road and on Interstate 295 without really noticing how much greenery there was once you left the environs of Portland and how many small businesses too numerous to mention of people working out of their houses or in small shops along the route that he had never noticed before speeding by at forty or fifty miles an hour. That trend would become more pronounced the further south the walk proceeded.
No question Sam was dogging whatever he felt his general physical condition was in going up the final small hills into Congress Street in Portland to the U/U church where the leg would end (and begin the next day) and the pot luck supper and nightly program would take place. On the legs that Sam would walk from Freeport to Portsmouth at most some thirty or so people would march for some amount of time (only six or seven would walk the whole way from Ellsworth to Portsmouth as it turned out) reflecting the demographics of the average peace activists these days, the work schedules of younger walkers and other reasons for not going on for more than a part of the walk but there had been developed over the four or five previous walks that Brian and his crew of Maine VFPers and peace activists a superstructure of people and places willing contribute time, money, space or food to assist the walkers. So each stop for the day had a place for supper available and space for the nightly program which ranged from talks about the theme-the demilitarization of the seas, some readings or singing some songs. Also most stops had activists willing to put one or more walker up for the night.
This U/U Church was one such stop and Sam was scheduled to stay with a couple who lived just outside Portland. Sam had a small amount of food that night before he tried to find a quiet place away for the crowd to grab a little sleep before he went with his hosts. He found a spot in the basement where there was a couch which he went to sleep on. When he woke up he found out that it was after 9 PM on his cellphone and going back to the supper area he found that everybody was gone so he wound up sleeping on that couch for the night. Found that he was locked in as well although his car was parked right in front of the church after the shuttling forward from Cumberland. Fortunately he had his knapsack with his toiletries and medications in it and although hungry was ready at the door when the first walkers for the next leg into Saco (pronounced Socko by the way as a born and raised resident was at pains to tell he each time he said Sacko)
Although Sam had for the reasons already stated decided to start his walk in Freeport he was most familiar with Route One from Portland south to the New Hampshire border since he had been a life-long Mainiac (not officially of course since he had not been born there the minimum requirement for that status) having been going to Maine for some fifty years on vacations and for a period owning a condo in Wells. So all of the sights and sounds going south were now familiar and he acted as something of a “tourist guide” as they past various landmarks of note on these sections. Even gave information to some of those who lived in northern Maine as it turned out since they lived so far north they might as well have been in different states.
Along the way to Saco the line of march passed the still operating Olde Saco Drive-In which he explained to those marchers directly in front of him had been subject to a recent forage by him and his long-time partner Laura, Laura Perkins. Back in August as they had done the previous few years since giving up the condo in Wells (didn’t use it enough both had agreed and in winter Florida beckoned to warm cold bones time) they would rent a condo in that same complex for a week or two in order to get Sam’s Maine ocean air waves splashing against the rocks fix taken care of (Laura was so-so on the matter). This year as part of the deal Laura told Sam they had to do some others things besides splash the waves and look at the rocks so Sam had come up with the old time drive-in movie idea which he had among other (not Laura who had grown up on a farm in upstate New York where her family nixed such family-friendly ideas as a Drive-Ins).
That idea was not spur of the moment on his part since he had recently purchased one of those “oldies but goodies” CD compilations of classic, now classic, rock and roll from the 1950s his coming of age time which on the cover had artwork depicting a scene with boys and girls around cars with the inevitable Drive-In intermission stand and humungous movie screen in the background. A classic picture from his youth. Classic too the way that he and his corner boys back in Carver would get into the local Cranberry Hill Drive-In (his growing up town of Carver then the cranberry bogs to the world). As he explained to Earnest, a younger fellow VFPer who said he had also come of age at the drive-ins out in the Berkshires, the gang would pile into some car (not his since he did not own one until after college and after his Army stint) and just short of the admissions stand some would got the backseat wells and into the trunk before going up to pay the fee. In those days before somebody decided that by-the-carload was more profitable it was separate admissions so maybe two guys would pay the regular fee and everybody got in for free and later they would divide up whatever the two guys who paid by the number of guys who got in. All this of course to meet up with those girls from another car who had done the same thing. Magic, pure magic.
With this story of youthful petty larceny under his belt after telling it to Laura that past August they decided to go one weekday night to the Olde Saco. Laura not so much for the teen-age romance part although she had a gleam in her eye that night as for the fact she had never been to one. And so they went. At the now one price per carload for couples and another for families admissions stand that could have used a good painting Sam mentioned the old time trick to the young guy taking the admissions who surprised Sam by saying that he had caught some kids doing that backseat wells/trunk trick earlier in the summer. Sam raised his fist laughingly in solidarity.
Well things had certainly changed in the drive-in scene at least that night except of course for the intermission stand which also could have used a good coat of paint (maybe hadn’t been painted since Beach Blanket Bingo held forth on the screen) since the Drive-In it was only about half full, almost exclusively families with lawn chairs out. Instead of the old time speaker that half the time you would forget to take off the driver’s side window before you left the lot leaving the damn thing twisted on the ground you tuned into a specified radio channel. Progress. What hadn’t changed, remember that gleam in Laura’s eyes, and which Sam did not mention to Earnest was how those windshields got all fogged up that night. He said he would leave that to the imagination.
Most of the way the walkers were walking on the left side of road most of the time for two very simple reasons; it is always better on major highways, even on old time major highways with lesser traffic these days to face the on-coming traffic than to have it coming up behind you, and, that same left-side on-coming traffic is more likely to see your lead sign [a sign extolling the virtues the theme of the march “Demilitarizing Our Seas” and some added information] and honk support than on the right side and from the back although once the drivers caught onto whatever they thought was going on with the line of flag-waving people a fair amount of honking came from that side as well. The meaning of the honks politically was hotly debated along the line of march especially by Sam who had a theory about the gradation of support based on the extent of the honking but also about what would motivate people to do that honking rather than joining the march. We will however let Sam stew in his own juices trying to figure that one out.
What Sam did see shortly after that Olde Saco Drive-in sighting as he turned his head left to see a closed down for the season ice cream shop (usually such places are this far north are closed by Columbus Day but as you go further south in Maine the “summer season” extends a little longer and a few such spots will remain open until the end of the month, no later). He suddenly realized that it was the locally famous Martin’s Ice Cream Shop which he had been in a few years back but at night so he didn’t realize that the marchers had come up to the place that quickly. Of course the place sold very good ice cream or otherwise Laura, a real ice cream aficionado, would have turned her nose up at it and fled the place ice cream half eaten.
But what made Sam take a double-take was a memory of that night a few years back when they had entered the place and found an old time working jukebox with rock and roll hits from the 1950s and 1960s. And three for a quarter too just like back in the day. The reason that Sam and Laura were up in Maine that time, maybe mid-July was that Laura a super-computer techie had just retired from her job and they were celebrating that fact with a few days up the coast. Laura had gone over to the machine and began perusing the playlist and asked Sam for a quarter to make her selections. Sam couldn’t remember all three selections but he did remember one was Its In His Kiss. Better though was watching Laura sway with the beat of the songs, ice cream in hand, swaying like a young teenage girl full of what was ahead in life. That moment he wished he had known her then. Yeah, wished he could have seen her swaying that slender body then.
Walking along Sam became conscious as they entered the last stretch before the nightly church stay at the Congregational Church (not U/U this time but doctrinal just as high flown Protestant god praise Jehovah as that crowd, maybe more so since that doctrine of independent lay-driven gathered church life came out of deep English revolution times and so hell and brimstone righteousness born back in those Cromwellian times) that his old haunt, his old between marriages (and at least once while married the second time) haunt, the also now closed for the season Olde Saco Motel where they did not ask questions, did not care what went on with who except keep it quiet, keep the family-friendly reputation. He had gone there so many times years back that Jim and Sarah whom he knew by first names and was on friendly terms would accept a check from him, unusual in suspicious Maine, in the suspicious hotel industry and in the heat of the Quebecois summer season. More than once he had brought some young thing there to keep him company, to “curl his toes” as the old blues singers used to say, and they were right. Just then as he walked past the forlorn place he thought about Lilly, Lilly from Saint Pierre up in the Gaspe, up high in ocean side Quebec and how she had “curled his toes and then some.” He had picked her up at Sonny Jack’s, a bar down in Old Orchard where the younger and available Quebec girls, hung out. Her English was not to good but after a few drinks, hers anisette, for him his beloved Irish whiskey and plenty of it and a couple of dances from the music of the jukebox that he went to that place to hear the language barrier was the least of their problems. So he coaxed her to his Olde Saco room about one in the morning, all quiet like and began to take his liberties with her, she didn’t resist nothing like that but when he tried to pull her panties off she said no, emphatically no, that she did not have sexual intercourse on the first date, no way. She asked in her halting English something about doing the deep French way for him which he was not sure he understood. Of course as she took down his pants and began to play the flute he got her meaning right away. Yeah, he learned that night there was more than one way to curl a guy’s toes. Deep in that thought he suddenly snapped out of it realizing he was moving too close to the highway as a blush came over him which he hoped nobody saw. Even on a sober mission Sam chuckled to himself one is not removed from the real world, not at all.
Walking to Arundel woods, Walking to Arundel woods the old familiar Child ballad Sam remembered from the 1960s folk minute kept pounding in his head as they began walking the next day for high Kennebunk. And strangely here this far south there are still a great many small houses separated by expanse of woods as they moved along (that great distances between houses not a plus since along with the march, banners, and programs the organizing group had put forth a leaflet to be distributed as they moved and were looking for more people to pass them out to [see above top], to be distributed along the way. Finally they got to their lunchbreak stop, a flea market area now mostly closed except for a small clot of die-hard dealers (or maybe just lonely to get out of the house and communicate with others since most of those dealers were old fogies like him.
Most days lunch was an hour or hour and proposition to allow for some rest and to make sure that the walkers did not arrive too early at the day’s end stop. Sam, after having his graham cracker and peanut butter, natural peanut butter no question, couldn’t resist checking out the various tables filled with a potpourri of wares. See in the old days Sam to help make ends meet before his law practice got off the ground would scour the flea markets looking for old letters, postcards and stamps. Made many a trip to Maine to the fleas and antique shops looking for that perfect storm treasure chest filled with old letters and stuff to be gotten for a song since back then the dealers would not have been that savvy about the value of old mildewed letters and just wanted to sell the chest for their troubles. Although Sam never found that big catch, the one to retire on, he made decent money in those days before the dealers got wise to value and publishing companies would put out catalogues for every possible kind of rarity and so he gave it up. This day though the dealers looked like something out of the Fryeburg Fair the dregs of incestuous Maine long nights, cold winters and too many close quarters. And their wares with few exceptions were mainly objects related to fishing gear, guns, hunting and king of the hill old collectibles.
The minute that Sam heard back in Saco about that night’s stay at an alternative high school where the kids were going to prepare the meal and also were going to provide the entertainment he was intrigued. Intrigued by what such a school, an old storefront school, might look like in the 21st century of standardized tests and teaching to the tests rather than exploring subjects and ideas the old fashion way for their beauty. Long ago he had started out as a teacher with a number of friends who were looking for something to do after the Vietnam War “seeking a newer world” had run its course and the tide had ebbed leaving lots of idealistic young people perplexed about the social road forward. One of the decisions that he had made while in that Army stockade was that he would no longer pursue a legal career and instead go into teaching (he would not get back to that law school until later after several years of teaching under his belt when he went to New England School of Law nights for several years to get his degree and license).
His belief, the collective that he worked with common belief, which united them in their purpose whatever else, was that in order change the world, in order to stop the endless wars as a matter of human policy you had to get to the kids, show them another way, a way that he had never been shown and some of his fellows either. In the early 1970s and beyond all the rage in progressive education was the idea of alternative schools, teacher-student run with plenty of liberty and plenty of ways to express yourself. Various members of the collective were driven by different models. Sam’s, after spending a summer in Cuernavaca down in Mexico with his first wife (also interested in these idea at the time) at Ivan Illich’s hacienda in the hills he took to Illich’s model, the ideas in his book De-schooling Society. And the group really did try to work out the possibilities but just ran out of steam, or had to get a “real” teaching jobs to survive or they ran up against incredible state educational bureaucratic problems even getting off the ground. So yes he was interested up in small town Maine about how successful they would be.
If you judged by the self-directedness of the students who on their own made an excellent meal, the great presentation of the program made up of music, folk music if you can believe that, and thoughtful presentations on the issues of demilitarizing the seas then the place was a success at least at a one night glance. Sam laughed to himself though as the walkers started out the next morning headed to York that maybe, just maybe, his positive attitude was egged on by the fact that for breakfast that morning someone had brought in warm apple crisps, his favorite of which he helped himself to two large servings. He had missed out on his favorite place for apple crisp back in Boston this year so this was pay-back, big pay-back.
Funny how as many times as Sam had travelled Route One in Maine mainly from Portland down that he missed a million sites that he knew that he had passed by. Sure some of the buildings and scenery had changed, what hadn’t in the fifty or so years he had been coming up to coastal Maine (the interior mainly a book sealed with seven seals and of no particular interest to him as he was not a blueberry picking alpine hunter or Fryeburg Fair denizen thank you). Of course with the Interstate, tiredness with way over developed so you might as well be in that strip mall leafy suburb you hailed from Cape Cod (and Cape Ann a little less so), some discretionary spending money and a growing cohort of those who had retired and had the leisure to head up the coast in three seasons anyway the magnet of rocky coasts was too much of a lure to keep the place semi-isolated as in the old days. The old days when a cozy cottage, a wooden cabin or a trailer would provide whatever worldly comforts were needed for a getaway weekend. Now you could hardly see the ocean stretch from the highway in say high Ogunquit without a motel, hotel, no tell impeding your view (and subject of the soft-sell “ocean view” so prevalent among the real estate set).
So yes things were different, more crowded, witness the daily mid-summer traffic jams in places like York, that same situation in Ogunquit and Wells which were hardly possible back in the day. Different but some things kind of hung on. As the walk made its morning break at Big Daddy’s, the closed for the season Big Daddy’s, in Wells he realized that some of the changes were just a matter of locale like that institution. He had first tasted Big Daddy’s ice cream (made from secret recipes according to legend) when the locale was at the Viking in Ogunquit and it was part of larger restaurant operation along that part of Route One then. That had been with his first wife whose people had a place in York and they raved about the Viking ice cream. She, they were not wrong on that account. Many years later with Laura he had come filled with those same raves and found the place had closed down. Damn. It had closed down for good as far as he knew. Then one day a few years later they were driving to Kennebunkport so Laura could look at the shops when they saw the Big Daddy’s sign and a smaller sign which indicated that the ice cream had been served previously at the old Viking. He stopped the car (holding up busy traffic) and turned around. Yes it was the same ice cream just at a different locale and which only served the ice cream not the other stuff on the Viking menu. Damn that morning he wished the place was open. Double damn.
On the uneventful walk to York (uneventful except to bore every fellow walker who would listen to him for two minutes with his arcane knowledge of every motel on the stretch and of all the paths to the beaches) Sam thought about how fortuitous it was that he had gone to the October monthly meeting just before the walk had started up in Ellsworth since if he had not been at that gathering he probably would not have found out about the walk since he was neither a regular attender of meetings in Cambridge (too boring and too much chatter when business could be done in about an hour rather than the two it usually took) nor looked at the notices that came thundering through his e-mail service. He was very much a member for the big occasions, the parade marches on Saint Patrick’s Day and Armistice Day, the memorial services scattered throughout the year, the various social events, fund-raisers and such and former coordinator Paul Sullivan’s get-away weekends in York where they were now heading. Yes it would be good to rest his head in Paul’s bungalow which he had slept in on previous trips and was scheduled to sleep in that night since priority had been given to walkers over those who were just coming up from Boston to show solidarity or to walk the final full day. Paul of course a big burly Irishman, who had done hard service in Vietnam when it counted, also loved to organize social events, events like providing a memorable stay for the walkers on the night before their last full day of walking. And he did, had several Smedley’s come up to help him, several more including him to march the final day to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard (which as Sam kept harping on was actually in Kittery, Maine across the river). He provided a full spread of food for all kinds of eaters, including vegans for the dinner (and breakfast) that had been authorized by the Executive Committee who voted that the chapter would pick-up the bill, provided a musical line-up, including himself on the banjo and to top things off got the chapter-affiliated marching band, the Leftist Lunge to perform as the weary marchers made the turn to his house. Oh yeah and had Mother Nature provide a sunny day and high tide to splash against the rocks on the ocean across the street from his house.
Sam said the final day, final full day, he (and the others as well) was full of piss and vinegar to finish up strong at the Naval Base and then the short march across the bridge to Prospect Park in Portsmouth by the river where a planned program to greet the walkers was to take place. It was a breezy day so the VFP flags (and the others too) were in full bloom looking very good as the most walkers on the walk according to Brian showed up to close out the 175 mile righteous march. Everybody pushed hard as well because the fourteen miles to the base had to be done in order to catch the Friday afternoon shifts coming out of the main entrance and show the “colors.” When they arrived they split into two on either side of the exit (the federal police who manned the gate had told them that a blue line painted on the entrance road could not be passed or they were subject to arrest). So they stayed there for an hour as the staggered shifts went Friday night home.
All the great honking along the way down Route One was totally missing as the men and women came out and many shook their heads in dismay or disgust. See they thought the demonstrators, and that is what one guy told Sam he thought they were, wanted the workers to lose their jobs by shutting down the base and losing their livelihoods certainly a reason for scowls and dirty looks. This though is where Sam thought things broke down a little, couldn’t help but break down in the face of the workers’ confusion. The idea of the march was not to throw anybody on the scrapheap except maybe the naval personnel but to convert the current wasteful and destructive military uses to more productive pursuits but that probably seemed utopian to the scowling workers and hellish to the military contractors. No question much work needed to be done that could not be done that day to inform and detail what that non-military use of the seas might look like. Sam said he repeatedly sighed when thinking about the tasks of education ahead.
The next morning a short rally and walk back to the Naval Base in Kittery took place but the real deal had been the long march to affect history and to get those scowls from the previous day to go away.
No comments:
Post a Comment