‘Vacationland’ awash with memories

VACATIONLAND: A HALF CENTURY SUMMERING IN MAINE, by David E. Morine, Down East Books, 233 pages, paperback, $15.95.

David E. Morine’s love affair with Maine started in 1946 when he was 3. That was the first year his parents rented a cabin at Jordan’s Camps on Lovewell Pond not far from the Fryeburg airport. For the next 20 years, the family spent the first two weeks of July in the Little Beaver cabin.

While in college, Morine bought his place on Kezar Lake for $13,000. For almost 50 years, he has spent part of every summer in western Maine. A Massachusetts native, the writer is the former vice president for land acquisition at the Nature Conservancy, and author of “Good Dirt: Confession of a Conservationist,” “The Class Choregus” and “Pit Bull: Lessons from Wall Street’s Champion Trader.” He and his wife, Ruth, live in Great Falls, Va., the rest of the year.

Morine chronicles his half-century of visiting the state nicknamed “Vacationland” in his new book. More than half of the 24 chapters in “Vacationland” previously appeared in magazines. Regular readers of Down East magazine may recognize many of the author’s essays. The book essentially is a collection of stories, the kind people who have summered in the state many years love to tell their friends back in the “real world.”

The best chapters are the first few, which describe vacationing in the 1950s at the camps owned by the Rev. Jack Jordan. Even by 1950s standards, they were rustic – no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no running water. Camp chores included hauling wood for the stove that Morine’s mother cooked on, lugging large blocks of ice for the old-fashioned icebox where they stored food, and getting drinking water from a spring “a long quarter mile back into the woods at the base of a hemlock gully.”

The writer vividly recounted those rituals, always performed with his older brother Ted. In a time before the Environmental Protection Agency, the boys used round, glass gallon jugs that had once held kerosene. Nobody thought it was strange or possibly unhealthy to reuse them for drinking water, according to Morine.

“We’d sprint down the path, and while Ted flipped back the wooden cover to the spring, I’d unscrew the covers to the jugs. Then Ted would start swatting and I’d start filling. The water was so clear that at first I’d think the spring was empty. That misperception would be clarified when a stinging cold shot up my arm.

“Glog, glog, glog – bubbles would start trickling to the surface. I’d feel the mosquitoes in my mouth, my eyes, my nose, my ears, my hair all buzzing away, enjoying their feast. Whap, whap, whap. Ted would be pounding me on my head, my back, my arms, my legs.”

Every good storyteller knows that kind of description is essential to holding the attention of listeners or, in Morine’s case, readers. Yet what worked for an individual article in a monthly magazine tends to get repetitive in a book. One fishing story piles up on top of another in the early chapters and saga after saga about the Thursday night softball games at Westways, a Kezar Lake resort, jam the latter ones.

Two of the most delightful chapters, however, are about the dual dilemma – renters and friends – faced by the owners of summer property in Maine as the Fourth of July looms. “The Renters from Haverhill” tells how the FBI and the Oxford County sheriff came into Morine’s life when, as a financially strapped newlywed, he rented his camp on Kezar Lake to “the renters from hell.” It turned out to be every summer home owner’s nightmare.

“Have a Wonderful Week” honestly answers the question friends and family often pose to people who camp on any of Maine’s lakes: “If you’re not using your place, would you mind if we borrowed it for a few days?” Morine candidly wrote that “… While you’d like to tell them, ‘Mind? You bet we mind. Our cabin is very special, and having you or anybody else there without us is unthinkable,’ what you actually say is, ‘Er, um, well, er, I guess that would be okay.'”

Morine’s book is best read in small doses, a chapter every few days. “Vacationland” may spark memories for others who, like the author, enjoy Maine’s most glorious summer season, then slip through a turnpike tollbooth at the first hint of frost. For folks who live in Maine year round, however, the book sometimes reads like false bravado, spewed by another one of those “summah people.”

This time next summer, the book likely will be a fixture in many camps around the state. Some copies will rest quietly on dusty bookshelves. Others will be placed with the list of dos and don’ts that owners leave renters and visitors.