The long trail home Blue Hill pastor publishes a transcendental almanac

The Rev. Rob McCall told a story on a recent Sunday afternoon in the basement meeting room of the First Congregationalist Church of Blue Hill.

“One time, my little brother, John – he’s three years younger than I am – he must have been about 4 years old,” he said. “And my father and older brother were fishing, and my little brother was, I think, going to see them, and he was walking across a log that was supposed to cover this little brook, and he fell in!

“Oh, and my father came running over to pull him out, and he tripped over a tent peg – and that was kind of a shock, to see your father running full speed and then falling – but he managed to fish my little brother out of the water, and at that time, he was into raisins. And he still had his handful of raisins squeezed, dripping wet, in his hand when they pulled him out of the water.”

McCall, 62, laughed, holding up his fist like his brother did that day. Those camping trips in Wyoming, Montana and his home state of Oregon are some of the pastor’s brightest memories. Perhaps among his darkest is the day the family packed up their home and set out for the city life in Chicago.

“I can still remember looking out the back of the car and saying goodbye to Mount Hood,” he said.

Five decades later, McCall has published his first book, “Small Misty Mountain: The Awanadjo Almanack” (Pushcart Press, $22), a collection of anecdotes, insights, bits of history, and a year’s worth of observations from the bluffs McCall now calls home on Blue Hill Mountain.

McCall first saw the squat 934-foot mountain that sits to the north of its namesake town on a family trip just before the move to Chicago. Then, in 1967, he and his wife, Becky, who painted the cover of the almanac, honeymooned in Blue Hill. And 20 years ago, the couple started a new life here. She fills galleries with her paintings, and he leads a congregation of about 150 in worship each Sunday morning.

McCall’s roots in religion run deep – his grandfather, father, mother and brothers are all ministers, and he is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School – but the 258-page almanac leans more on nature and spirituality, its passages reminiscent of Annie Dillard and Henry David Thoreau.

“Around here,” McCall writes, “the towns are Christian for the most part. But the woods are Algonkian. The boulders, ponds and waterfalls are Shinto. The skies are Taoist. The islands and the bays are Celtic, and the mountains and hills are Buddhist.”

His earnest insights – which range in topic from Darwin to death to immigration to salmon farming – harmonize with light asides, most notably the “Critter of the Week” segment. (Domestic turkeys, he writes, “are known to drown in heavy rain. … [But] they never lock their keys in their car or shoot each other while hunting humans.”)

The passages, organized by moons – such as Wolf Moon, Flower Moon and Harvest Moon – are mostly culled from his column in Blue Hill’s Weekly Packet, his radio show on WERU-FM 89.9 and 102.9, and his Sunday sermons. At times, they feel like parables, as in his description of the shy cedar waxwing, who by nature disproves that only the aggressive survive, a quiet suggestion about our own behaviors.

His “Mountain Report” documents the highlights of his weekly hourlong hikes on Wednesdays to the peak of the mountain – called Awanadjo in Algonquin – since 1990. He even climbed it during the ice storm of 1998, wearing spikes on his boots and listening to trees snap and ice falling on ice.

“The sacred mountain is a motif in just about every religion,” he said. “You know, the Irish, the Jewish, everyone has their sacred mountain. I really feel once you get up to the top there that you’re on a different plane. You’re in a different place. … It’s no mistake that the law was delivered to Moses on a mountain, and … St. Patrick got his vision on the mountain, and the Sioux Indians get their vision on the mountain.”

But he acknowledges, too, that to him, the mountain just feels like home.

“I somehow felt that when we came here, it kind of closed that gap from what I had to leave when I was 10 years old. What’s the word? Discontinuity. The mountain took on the significance of – it sounds trite to say it, but – the way life should be.”

The Rev. Rob McCall preaches at the First Congregationalist Church in Blue Hill at 10 a.m. Sundays. “Small Misty Mountain: The Awanadjo Almanack” is available at Blue Hill Books and Northlight Books in Blue Hill and online at Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com. A portion of the proceeds from the sales will benefit Eastport’s Save the Bay. McCall’s radio show airs at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and 8:30 a.m. Sundays on WERU. Tracy Collins can be reached at collinstb@gmail.com.