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January 20, 2012
photographs and text by Ryan Cook
If you’re a born and bred Mainer, chances are you’ve read the book Lost On A Mountain In Maine. The book has been a part of the Maine studies curriculum since 1972, so you may have read it as fourth grade student or were lucky enough to have Donn Fendler himself come to your class and recount his epic tale of survival. If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s an inspiring true story of a young boy’s faith, determination and will to live as he became lost on Maine’s highest peak. During the summer of 1939, 12-year-old Donn Fendler was hiking Mt. Katahdin when a fast approaching rain and sleet storm separated him from his family. Nine days later he had traveled over eighty miles through the woods without pants, shoes, or any idea of where he was heading before finally making it out alive. I could recount the epic journey he went through over the course of those nine days but I wouldn’t want to spoil the experience of reading his tale first hand. It’s a quick read so do yourself a favor and get the book!
My parents introduced me to Donn’s book at age nine, just before my first Katahdin hike, and I instantly fell in love with the story. As I began my ascent toward Baxter Peak all I could think of was how a young boy, just like myself, could possibly survive being lost on this herculean piece of rock. Even on a bright and sunny day the mountain felt as though it could swallow me whole. I couldn’t fathom it during a rain and sleet storm, as had been the case during Donn’s climb. You can imagine my delight when my fourth grade teacher announced to the class that not only would we be reading Lost On A Mountain In Maine, but Donn would be making a personal appearance to recount his story firsthand. From this moment on Donn’s story would be permanently fixed in the back of my mind. Kids my age looked up to sports figures and movie stars, but not me. Donn was my kind of hero.
Seventy years after Donn had emerged from the woods the phone in my small Boston apartment rang. On the other end of the line was Donn, returning a voicemail I had left inquiring about possibly adapting his story into a narrative feature film. Donn informed me that countless people before me had come to him with the same idea, but none were successful. The problem was that Donn had sold his own life rights over twenty years ago and was never able to get them back. The three gentlemen who purchased the rights were unable to get the film made, yet would not give up the rights. A CFO from Pepsi, a well-known Maine gubernatorial candidate, and countless others had tried to recover them, but still Donn’s rights remained out of reach. It came as no surprise that even though Donn invited me to come to his home and speak with him, he had little interest in talking about plans for a movie. He was frustrated, aggravated and had put the thought behind him. Nevertheless, my production partner and I went and visited Donn. It was a meeting we would never forget.
Two years later I stood in front of Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, waiting for Donn to arrive. It was the premiere of our documentary Finding Donn Fendler, at the Maine International Film Festival. The documentary not only tells of Donn’s journey through the Maine wilderness, but also covers the long and arduous process we went through in getting Donn’s rights back. It was almost twenty months from our first meeting at Donn’s house, but we had done something that countless other had tried to do for over twenty years. It took numerous phone calls, much negotiation and even having to battle a big shot producer from Texas who offered ten times the amount of money we could afford; but Donn’s rights were finally back in the proper hands. Donn seemed to have a new energy about him, and for the first time in a while he had new hope that his story would someday appear on the silver screen. We were proud, excited and on cloud nine. We knew it wouldn’t last long though, and that this was just the beginning. If we were going to make a movie, the road ahead would certainly be a long one.
Today we continue to push forward with the same passion that inspired us the first time we read Donn’s book so many years ago. We know this movie is going to be made the same way Donn survived his adventure through the woods — one step at a time. We plan to begin phase one of production this summer and are reaching out to let supporters know of our goal. Although the book should forever be the first way young kids are introduced to his story, the cinematic medium will allow fans to truly experience Donn’s adventure in a new way and further preserve his story for generations to come. We believe that a feature film will not only give us the ability to introduce Donn’s story to new fans, but will also allow us to promote the state of Maine on a national, even international stage. However, at the end of the day we want to make this film for the thousands of people who have a connection to Donn’s story because, as Donn himself once said, “It’s not my story anymore, it belongs to the people of Maine.”
Editors note: I remember Donn Fendler’s visit to my fourth grade class!
The Maine is pleased to support Ryan, Donn and their whole team.
Visit lostonamountaininmainefilm.com to learn more.
Click over to the kickstarter page and support.
January 17, 2012
photographs by Justin Gove
January 16, 2012
first photograph by Tom Cox
all other photographs and text by Jessica Stammen
For the past few winters, during the weeks that are made of the dark cold days between holiday festivities and mud, I have been lucky enough to join a dozen or so eighth graders at the local middle school for a special class exploring color. In the bleak or blinding white of January there is nothing better than playing with Peter Pan greens, blues you can swim in, No. 2 yellows, and suntan neutrals, to use the wonderfully descriptive words of my students. It is just so unexpected — the color, their imagination.
We work Joseph Albers style with the full spectrum of 314 Color Aid papers. The first assignment is a challenge: make one color look like two. See the photo below? The pair of small squares on each board are the same color purple and the same color green, respectively. By placing them on two differently colored backgrounds each pair is variously influenced and the foreground squares appear to change, to be two different colors. In the photo above a student successfully took this lesson one step further and made two different foreground colors (one an ultramarine, the other a dusty purple) appear to be one in the same, again by placing them on two different backgrounds. Context is everything.
And that’s just it; the white of my winter is never just white when I’m surrounded by the full palette of my students’ personalities and immersed in the ever surprising study of color.
January 12, 2012
text by Lacy Simons
In his recent op-ed in the New York Times Richard Russo called Lacy Simons a “talented young bookseller.” Indeed she is. Lacy owns, operates and otherwise curates Hello Hello Books, an independent bookshop in Rockland.
It’s a terrible irony: now that I own a bookshop, I have a lot less time to read. At least that was the case in 2011, as I got the business off the ground; I hope that 2012 turns that around. Until that happens, though, I’m going to focus on what I’m not reading: books that have recently wormed their way on to my (always daunting, always epic) To Be Read list, many of which I have ferreted away in my workspace at the shop but have not yet been able to dive into with any regularity or sincerity. As a lover of used and new books alike, I’m fascinated with the trajectory of books in our lives, the how and where and why a copy of something falls into your hands, and as much as possible I’ll illuminate the roots of these neglected books. Pressed for time as I am, think of these as snapshots, or the gathering together of the threads that tie me to the book.
Radial Symmetry by Katherine Larson
First collection of poems. Won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2011. Author is a research scientist & field ecologist in Arizona. Found in the feed of a Goodreads friend; investigated based on cover art, which features one of my favorite Art Forms in Nature illustrations by Ernst Haeckel; bought based on bits like this, from “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees”:
Today I dissected a squid,
the late acacia tossing its pollen
across the black of the lab bench.
In a few months the maples
will be bleeding. That was the thing:
there was no blood
only textures of gills creased like satin,
suction cups as planets in rows. Be careful
not to cut your finger, he says. But I’m thinking
of fingertips on my lover’s neck
last June. Amazing, hearts.
This brachial heart. After class,
I stole one from the formaldehyde
& watched it bloom in my bathroom sink
between cubes of ice.
Dedication: for my mother and father
Most promising poem title: “Water Clocks”
Sample epigraph: A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller. Paul Klee
Fifth word on page 47: baker
Forty-seventh word on page 5: they
January 11, 2012
photographs and text by Tony Oppersdorff
This circular pound on Rte. 126 in Jefferson was constructed in 1829.
Joy go with him who attempts to impound an estray, for with such an attempt comes a swarm of vexations,petty yet powerful as the wasps and hornets of Canaan.
– Samuel Watson, Anomalies of Fence Law, 1877
Have you ever wondered about those Neolithic-like livestock pounds scattered about the Maine landscape? Have you ever walked into one and closed your eyes and imagined what they would have looked, sounded and smelled like when filled with hungry cows bawling to be milked or fed, or a testy bull determined to crush you against the wall? Or, for that matter, an angry owner accompanied by several large sons determined to retrieve their property without paying a fine?
By the mid-18th century there were enough farms in Maine for neighbors to be concerned about other people’s livestock getting loose and wandering into their gardens and cornfields where the damage could threaten a family’s survival. In the early days the solution was simple: bring the animal back or feed it and wait for it to be claimed. After all, neighbors could hardly afford to do otherwise. But attitudes changed as farm crowded against farm. It became more difficult to tolerate repeat offenders, or determine fair compensation for damages, or know whose bull had impregnated whose cow, or agree on reparations after a drove of 250-pound Yorkshire pigs tore up an orchard, or goats devoured potato plants — all serious matters when nearly every family grew its own food and was responsible for its own well-being.
One of the earliest of Maine’s hundred or so stone pounds was in Harpswell, completed in 1793; very little of the original structure remains. Some, like the one built in Waldoboro in 1819, were rectangular. Others, like one built in Jefferson in 1829, were round. Regardless of the shape, they generally enclosed between 1200 and 1600 square feet, had stout, seven-foot high walls, and massive gates that opened beneath large granite lintels. These small fortresses were intended not only to control the egress of animals, but the ingress of angry owners intent on retrieving their livestock from the town-appointed “pinder” whose services were compensated for by the fines he collected. For that he had to find and capture the stray, lead it to the pound, and finally care for the animal to the owner’s satisfaction. Actual payment was never assured, even with persuasion. And if the pinder left his impounded animal unguarded while in search of another stray, there was every reason for the owner to quietly remove his property — hence the massive walls and locked gate. It was in the pinder’s interest to sleep lightly; perhaps it was for this reason that the town fathers often gave this job to the youngest newlywed in the community — or anyone else whose need for money exceeded his ability to avoid this responsibility.
According to William N. Locke, Ph.D., author of “The Rise and Demise of the Cattle Pound,” the simultaneous increase in population and sense of civic responsibility diminished the need for pounds: with more farms came more walls and fences, and fewer strays. Also, by around 1825, fewer towns were being incorporated, marginal farms began to be abandoned, and many young men left for less rocky pastures, or succumbed to the lure of the city. Farms that thrived were the best and most established; animal containment was less of an issue. The final blow occurred with the introduction of cheap, barbed wire in the 1870s. The pound in the Baker Forest Preserve, built around 1900, may have been one of the last ones constructed.
Like old stonewalls running through woods of oak and maple, the empty pounds remain as testimony to the back-wrenching effort and remarkable skill required to farm this land. Today, despite human visitors, these forsaken structures provide some protection to plants. Among the most common is the ubiquitous partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) a forest groundcover favored by deer and grouse, and formerly used by Native American women to ease childbirth.
Waldoboro’s pound, built in 1819, is square. Cars pass by on Main St. (Rte. 220) where horse-and-wagons once rumbled along at a much slower pace.
“Pity the Pinder” is taken from Best Nature Sites: Midcoast Maine, a collaboration between writer and photographer Tony Oppersdorff and writer and editor Kyril Schabert.
January 8, 2012
photographs by Jessica, Gregory and Tom Stammen
No snow to shovel.
No ice to skate.
Tap-tap, crack!
Crunch-crunch! No snow to make snowshoe tracks.
~
I dream of winter
zipping, whipping down the hill
me, my sled and I.
haiku by Gregory Stammen
January 4, 2012
text and haiku by Kristen Lindquist
painting by Eric Hopkins
Transportation is the name of my new book of poetry, my first, received this morning from the printer. And transported is how I feel to finally have a “real” book through which to share my poetry with people. The only shortfall of the book is its lack of haiku. This is the cover image, for which I am very grateful to Eric Hopkins:
Eric graciously let me choose the work I wanted for my cover. This piece, Waterways In The Bay, conveyed to me the pure joy of taking in the beauty of this landscape we inhabit, as well as the sense of motion, of flying above it all and gaining perspective–themes that I think recur in my poems, most of which are set in a similar landscape. This is one book I hope gets judged by its cover. But I hope the words hold their own, as well.
Twenty years of words,
flashy cover–at long last,
my very own book!
text and haiku by Kristen Lindquist
This one’s a bit arcane. Last night I dreamed I was editing a document for my director. He had a word in the document, “nouses,” that I questioned him about. I thought he was trying to write the plural of the French word “nous” or “we.” Remember, this is a dream, so the fact that that doesn’t make sense is beside the point. We ended up agreeing that it should be “nouveaux,” which also makes no sense. Shortly thereafter I woke up with these strange words echoing in my head.
After my morning ablutions, I checked my email. I’m signed up for wordsmith.org’s A.Word.A.Day. Each week has a different theme, and in honor of the new year, this week’s theme is words that begin with the “new” sound. Yesterday’s word was “numinous,” and today’s was “noosphere,” which means “the sum of human knowledge, thought, and culture.” I realized as I read today’s entry that although I hadn’t taken much note of yesterday’s word or the week’s word theme, something had clearly registered in my subconscious. And thus I dream about nouses and nouveaux and awaken to noosphere, a delightful synchronicity of sounds to wrap my mind around.
Each dream, the mind’s new–
blank slate for the noosphere
to noodle anew.
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