The other day I found a farm box truck in my bus parking place at Northeast Harbor. The trucks logo included Grand Isle, Maine. The farmer's son, who was driving, offered to move the truck from my parking space.
"No, that's okay," I said. "I'll only be here for five minutes. But you can tell me where in heck -- ''m not sure that's the word I used, but I'm being literary here -- Grand Isle, Maine is."
"It's as far north as you can get and still be in Maine," the son explained, adding that his father grew organic veggies on 400 acres there and came to this 'other Maine' twice a week. One trip was to the Ellsworth/Bar Harbor area, and a second trip was to the greater Newport area where the farmer kept a warehouse, the son said.
The next day the Bangor Daily News carried a front-page feature on the farmer. His website is http://www.crownofmainecoop.com/.
Organic farming is growing in Maine, even though most tourists understand Maine to be a rocky coast dominated by Acadia National Park and centered on the Jordan Pond House restaurant where they can stuff themselves with popovers.
When tourists ask me my about favorite lobster restaurant and how often do I buy popovers from the Jordan Pond House, I reply that we live here and so can't afford lobster, substituting baked beans for the lobster, and can't remember precisely what a popover is.
It was a farmer, Stephen Twombly, who's influence brought me to Maine, a farmer about whom I've written before. And once I moved here in 1965, this same farmer advised me, "You'll never make through a Maine wintah."
I did and still do.
And farming remains fascinating to me.
I admired Mr. Twombly because of his background and his making a living with about 20 cows and 400 acres of rocks. None of those guys who used to ride the local train into Philadelphia when I was a kid could do that. They carried briefcases designed to impress onlookers. But Mr. Twombly did impress me.
His background included being a trapper and using his earnings to buy the land on which he had trapped, which when I knew him was his farm.
In addition, to milking those cows -- sometimes finishing off an udder by hand and squirting milk at the cats, he hayed by an open cart pulled by his chug, chug, chug John Deere tractor. I have never forgotten the sound of that John Deere echoing across the open fields of Belgrade and near the barn. We kids got to help by pitching hay onto the cart after which he would pull the load to the barn and lift it to the hay mow by a fork levered by a pulley on a long rope.
On an afternoon for some long-forgotten reason, my father and I ventured into one of Mr. Twombly's pastures. When the guernseys decided we were not a cow, they ran toward us. To our suburban minds, they were charging us. Our suburban bodies ran as fast as they could and got over the fence.
They may have mistaken us for a moose, one of which they chased out of their pasture.
And at times we sat with Mr. Twombly and his wife, Gladys, in their old-fashioned New England farmhouse parlor with its wood stove fed by the piles of firewood stacked in the shed just outside.
And the Twomblys had a great Maine accent. Nowadays I listen for such an accent but rarely hear one. Too many imports like me
While living on Swan Lake, we were given raw milk by a couple of Massachusetts imports, as their family of three could not use enough. Not a farmer and nice enough, I found his'‘native' take on Henry D. Thoreau different than what I had ever read about the writer of The Maine Woods, Walden, and other interesting books. Thoreau was a squatter on the Walden land where he built his cottage, said our Swanville friend.
When writing for a western Maine newspaper, we bought milk from a farmer down the road a piece. This genuine Maine farmer had about 40 holsteins with a few guernseys thrown in to thicken the milk. One of those cows was in the throes of calving, when I happened to stop by with a couple of our kids. The birthing ended by my reaching in to the cow and pulling the calf out due to some difficulty, while the farmer did something else to make things work.
We've always bought eggs from the farm when we could. Presently we buy at John Edwards Market in Ellsworth eggs from Happy Town Farm in Orland. These eggs are organic and the largest, best eggs ever. One place we purchased them, a woman would fill her apron with eggs from hens' nests nearby and put them in a container for us. At another place I bought eggs, I would be talking to the farmer while the hens scrabbled around my feet.
Occasionally we've been forced to buy organic eggs at the supermarket. I chuckled at the description of "free range hens" from King of Prussia, PA. I remember King of Prussia well, as it is located about ten miles from where I was raised. King of Prussia consisted -- and does more so now -- of interstates and major local highways and a very large mall. I've wondered at times in which part of the mall these hens ranged freely.
In high school, still in Pennsylvania, I belonged to the Future Farmers of America Club, which fed my dream of some day becoming a farmer. Then I realized a farmer without a farm to inherit must somehow raise big bucks to buy a farm, and I knew I would never be a farmer. But I helped hay on a farm one summer.
Ah, the backbreaking, perspiring memories of tossing those bales onto a wagon, then into the barn, and at evening taking a bath -- this was in B.S., Before Showers, at least on that farm -- after shaking another bale of loose hay from my clothes.
Nor will I ever forget the gander, which chased me into the barn where I fled up the pile of hay bales.
Maybe I'm better off not being a farmer.
Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.
Milton M. Gross Copyright 2008
