Dinosaurs still hitting Maine trails Some old-timers remember when brook trout were called squaretails

The mercury in the backdoor thermometer was down to the welcome mat when, muttering and shaking his head, Hank Lyons shrugged his pack basket onto one shoulder and left the house. Snow creaked beneath his boots and with each breath his nostrils stuck like Velcro as, continuing his soliloquy, he shuffled toward the pickup that had pulled into the yard.

“Who’re you talking to?” said Jack McKeon when Hank climbed into the cab.

“Mainly to my wife but mostly to myself because she wasn’t listening to me anyway. We were engaged in a discussion when you arrived.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Jack quipped. “What brought that on so early in the morning?”

“Well, I was reading the letters to the editor in the paper and, wouldn’t you know, some anti-hunter had one in there proclaiming that hunters are compulsive killers. Now maybe you think that didn’t curdle my coffee. So, naturally, I started making a few proclamations of my own, the gist of them being that this state was a much better place 50 years ago than it is today. That’s when she called me a dinosaur. And I told her she’d paid me a compliment because that meant I could remember when this state was traditionally and truly Maine.”

“Well,” said Jack as they headed for the frozen-water fishing grounds where their ice shack shivered in the wind, “if you’re a dinosaur, I’m a woolly mammoth.”

“We lived in a better time,” Hank said wistfully. “Things were slower and quieter and friendlier, and people were comfortable minding their own business. Nobody cared if you went hunting or fishing or trapping; most everybody did. You just bought your license and went about your business without any trouble whatsoever. None of the stuff we see now. No one ridiculing and criticizing hunters … no blubbering about pictures of deer or moose being in the paper during hunting season. Cripes, back along if you came home with a deer on the car, the whole neighborhood would come to see it.”

“That’s the way it was,” Jack replied. “And we grew up taking it all for granted. It was a time we thought would last forever, but in no time at all it was gone forever. We didn’t have to take a hunter safety course to get a license and didn’t have to ask for permission to hunt. We’d just take our guns and dogs and go. Think about it, kids used to get excused from school for a few days so they could go to deer camp. It was a better time, that’s for sure. In all the tramping around we did with rods and guns, no one ever looked at us like we needed counseling, and we never saw a No Hunting or a No Trespassing sign. Take a look around now. Even town landings and right of ways to lakes and ponds are being blocked off. We didn’t know how lucky we were when we could leave a canoe on the shore of a pond or a marsh or a stream without anyone complaining about it or stealing it. Try that now.”

Gazing at swirls of wind-blown snow rising smoke-like from sprawling fields, Hank thought aloud, “God, those were great times. Remember when we used to catch live bait for Foster’s Sport Shop? Foster would give us a fly line or a knife or something in return … and he’d take a deer hide in trade for a pair of buckskin gloves.”

“Right,” Jack said through a smile. “And Cecil Pooler would give us 50 cents apiece for rabbits; which lasted just long enough for us to get back to Foster’s and buy some more shotgun shells. And when we needed some feathers for tying flies, Cecil would haul some out of his hens for us. Today the do-gooders would have him charged with cruelty to animals.”

Nodding, Hank mused, “Y’ know, Jack, it would be impossible to describe, to anyone who hadn’t lived it, what a great time we had growing up here. And things pretty much stayed that way right up until about 20 years ago. Hunting and fishing, studying nature and wildlife and the outdoors in general weren’t just sports or pastimes. It was our way of life, our heritage. And still is. But I’m afraid we’ve seen the best of it. There are too many people on the playground now and they’re playing conflicting games. And with all this development and posted land, the playground’s getting smaller every day. These developers will pour pavement on every piece of land they can get their hands on, and the people moving in here don’t know a double-barrel from a double haul, and don’t care to know. The outdoors traditions and cultures that made this state a mecca for sportsmen don’t mean a thing to them.”

“We always talk about hunting and fishing,” Jack reminded, “but all the other activities involved were just as interesting, and every bit as much fun. There was always a pup to train – and you could catch pigeons for training a bird dog without someone calling the cops on you – or a canoe to patch and paint. The hardware store sold a lot of Ambroid cement and orange shellac to people who owned canoes. It was common then to lacquer the bottom of a canoe with orange shellac, to shield the canvas from stubs and snags. We made bait needles from piano wire, and when we needed to get a fly down to where the fish were, we’d splice lengths of lead core to our old braided-silk fly lines.

“We did a pretty good job of repairing reels and replacing rod guides and tightening ferrules, but if we had a gun that was shot loose or misfiring, we took it to Bill Morrison. If Bill couldn’t fix it, it was time for a new one. There was always something to do, varnish snowshoes or pack baskets, tinker with outboards, put new leathers and buttons on oars, or build a duck blind. God knows we couldn’t afford to buy decoys, so we made them. Remember when the slaughterhouse out on the Green Point Road was torn down and we confiscated the slabs of cork used for insulating the storage room? We thought we’d struck the mother lode. I’ve still got a rig of coot decoys made from that cork.”

“We kept busy, didn’t we?” Hank said as they turned onto a plowed camp road. “And we hardly ever left the neighborhood. It was a better time, all right, an entirely different time. Now all we hear about is this so-called changing culture. Well, in my opinion all it’s doing is swamping a trail of travesty across this state. And you see it everywhere you look. This national park nonsense, for example, and all the earaches about John’s Bridge and the Allagash Waterway.

“Worse yet, it’s getting so the native stock can’t afford to live in the houses they worked all their lives to own. I don’t understand it. I’ve been in enough big cities to understand why people want to escape those asylums and come here to live. But I’ll never understand why they no sooner arrive here when they begin trying to create what they left.”

“Tell me about it,” said Jack as he drove the truck into a shoreline clearing that served as a makeshift landing and parking lot. “Go down to southern Maine and mention hunting or trapping and people will look at you like you’re Attila the Hun. But don’t despair old-timer, there are a lot of dinosaurs still making tracks in this neck of the woods. Mainers who remember when brook trout were called squaretails and the term fly-fishing meant trolling streamers for landlocks.” Jack chuckled but he wasn’t exactly joking when he added, “Now that fly casting has become fashionable it’s likely that if you mention a salmon chop to a graduate of a fly-casting school, he’ll think you’re referring to an hors d’oeuvre.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Hank grumbled. “People who can sew on a bait so that it’ll wobble and roll just right or troll a streamer so that it’ll dart like a spooked smelt are getting to be few and far between. Speaking of bait, did you get some good-size golden shiners?”

“Big enough so that if the togue don’t take them, we can fillet and fry them.”

Directly they loaded their gear onto a toboggan and started toward the ice shack anchored near the middle of the lake. Slogging in the soft snow and feeling the burn of the wind-chilled air in his lungs, Jack said, “Let’s take our time. No need of an old dinosaur like you courting cardiac arrest.”

Allowing that he wouldn’t get a better opportunity to throw the dart he’d been holding, Hank glanced at his lifelong partner and without breaking stride said, “Y’ know, Jack, I’ve been thinking, with that beard you’re growing and the weight you’re putting on, you’re beginning to look like a woolly mammoth.”

There’s an Irish saying that goes: “‘Tis better for a man to die young than to outlive all that he has loved.”

Tom Hennessey’s columns and artwork can be accessed on at www.bangornews.com. E-mail: thennessey@bangordailynews.net. Web site: www.tomhennessey.com.