MAINE ROOTS: Growing Up Poor in the Kennebec Valley, by Mark Walker, Picton Press, 178 pages, $23.

Maine has long enjoyed a reputation — even if undeserved — as inhabited by iconoclastic, hardy, shrewd Yankee traders or seafarers. Casual readers seem to always find humorous stories of how some sharp character with an odd way of speaking managed to extract gold from one’s teeth or to sell an old plug of a horse for a fortune.

Too frequently, this is the mold from which characters are cast. So it is refreshing to find a memoir of Maine rural life in the dark days of the ’20s and ’30s that doesn’t add to that lore, but rather provides a clear and at times humorous picture of what life was like for a youngster growing up then.

“Maine Roots: Growing Up Poor in the Kennebec Valley,” isn’t going to win any literary prize or reach many best-seller lists. But it is a rough-cut gem of description of farm life, of family struggles, and especially of toils in fields and forests, in kitchens and in barns. Here, a persistent reader will discover long-lost terms like “yarding,” and “edgins” — and clear descriptions, usually in anecdotal form, of what those terms mean.

Mark Walker doesn’t tell us about life on a New Portland farm, he shows us that life.

Here is the staunch grandfather with his potato in his pocket to keep off the “rheumatiz.” Here is grandma reading to her young charges at bedtime and instilling a love of books. Here is papa, who wasn’t a businessman, but at home in forests and trees. Here is mama, who ran off with another man and brought scandal to the family. And here are brothers and sisters farmed out from a family, some to other relatives to grow up, and others to be shipped off tearily to the Good Will Home, Farm and School.

Maybe it’s pretentious to call this a memoir. It’s really a fellow who has lived his years, now sitting by the stove of an evening and reminiscing about his early life, perhaps to his grandchildren.

Walker has certainly had a varied life — merchant seaman, steeplejack, stationary engineer, electrician, and even a magazine editor and free-lance writer. He’s written a previous book, “Cassis,” and has had two plays produced off-Broadway.

None of this is covered in this recollection of early life in the Carrabassett Valley. Even as we follow along with young Mark as he starts school — not one-room, but two-room — and the family moves to a farm, we are treated to a rare, real-world glimpse of what has come to be called a “hardscrabble” farm and a time when agriculture and industry in Maine were declining. There are marvelous descriptions of farm chores and lumbering, frequently told with little vignettes of people — a simple-minded farmhand who gloried in his purchase of a swaybacked old horse that soon died, the prim schoolmarm who took Mark’s sister to raise, the father later struggling with a postal route. Here are tales of the neutering of a bull, of brewing root beer and, later, home-brewed beer.

The language is rough at times but it only serves to sharpen the sense that the author is “telling it like it was.”

And at the end of the book, when he has taken us from first childhood to young adulthood and wandering in far locales, Walker sums it all up very neatly:

They weren’t the “good old days,” he says. “They weren’t that good and I don’t yearn for their return. Most children today would feel deprived if they had to live as we lived. But we didn’t feel that way, and our life was no different from that of our peers.”

Looking back, Walker says, “We had as much fun as children do today, though we were exposed to less `entertainment’ in a year than today’s child experiences in one day. We had to work and we rarely had any money. But this only made us appreciate it more when we did get a few nickels and a day off.”

The lasting effects of such a childhood, Walker says, were:

“We learned to be more self-reliant …

“We learned to work …

“We learned to be thrifty …

“… and many of us acquired a skewed attitude toward tobacco and alcohol.”

Walker went on to his varied adult experiences, but says: “I’ll always remember those golden days when we were young and green.”

Bill Roach is a free-lance writer who lives in Florida.