From "Multitudes: The Unauthorized Memoirs of Sam Smith"
Sam Smith - I like to call myself the farm’s first farmer. My morning chores as a teenager included bringing up the coal from the basement for the stove, emptying the trashcans and feeding the pigs. The three pigs lived in a pen to the west of the big barn – as it was known then. I would carry the day's garbage to the big barn, mix a second course of grain and water and then, with some relief to my nasal passages, turn these substances over to the grunting trio.
We kept our boats in the big barn off season and painted them first thing each summer. You can still see traces of the paint on posts in the barn and maybe also the sign on a beam that read “Humphrey in ’56.”
One of the guys I worked with was an old fellow named Walter Stowe, formerly with the Massachusetts highway department. Mr Stowe never got poison ivy and would eat it to prove it to me. He could recite a blasphemous version of the Lord's Prayer at breakneck speed and when you asked him how much something cost, he always replied, "25 cents, two bits, two dimes and a nickel, one quartah of a dollah." When you picked up your end of a plank, the instructions also never varied: "Head her southeast!" And he offered this assessment of a suddenly departed brother-in-law: "That fella never was any good. Now he's upped and died right in the middle of hay season."
When I introduced my future wife to Mr. Stowe and told him we were engaged, he did his shuffle and his head scratching, glanced at Kathy and then looked up at me over his little round glasses and said, "Pretty good for a girl."
" . . . Er, Mr. Stowe, Kathy's from Wisconsin."
Shuffle. Hat back on.
"Glad to meet you anyway."
As far as I was concerned, there was little Mr. Stowe didn't know and little he couldn't do. And if he didn't or couldn't, Jimmy Mann did or could. His motto was "If you're ever in a jam, here I am." Jimmy's family had come to Maine 300 years ago His father, Horace, still ran a farm just before you turned onto the main road to town.
Maine used to be known among the "summer complaints" like me as full of characters. "You sure have a lot of characters up here, " the visitor would say. An approved Maine response was, "Ayah, but most of them go home around Labor Day."
Maine humor has largely moved from casual interchange to books and videotapes. It's been many decades since the day I drove into a gas station, stepped out of my car into a puddle and heard a staffer say "How's the watah?"
Occasionally it still crops up. John at R&D Automotive told me once that my brother had been in with his car. "He said he kept smelling gas . . . so I told him to stop it."
Or the exchange at Leighton's department store:
"How ya doin?"
"You want the long story or the short one?"
"Give me the long one."
"Pretty good, I guess."
Or the time Bob Guillamette, the plumber, came to fix something. I asked him to also look at the tub he had recently installed because the water was slow to drain. He returned a couple of minutes later saying, "Jesus Christ, Sam, you're one of the lucky ones. Most of them won't hold water."
My father began to regard me as a useful adjunct to his enterprises, so much so that by the age of 14 he let Jimmy Mann teach me how to drive the army personnel carrier with its front-end winch and A-frame. I was double-clutching, shifting into six-wheel drive and using a winch to haul things out of places long before I was able to drive legally.
The truck was a marvelous machine that lasted for decades. It withstood all punishment including my father's attempt to launch a boat by towing it out on the mudflats. The truck, of course, became deeply mired, but its winch eventually pulled the vehicle back to dry land.
The Army truck was just one of a fleet of amazing vehicles that kept the farm going, ranging from the practical to the insane. For example. my father obtained the local Railway Express truck from Clarence Bolster, a familiar figure at the local railroad station. It was, however, short on brakes. Asked how one operated such a vehicle, Jim Degrandpre, son of the farm manager, explained, "You planned ahead." Jim's brothers, Richard and David, converted the family 1952 DeSoto station wagon into a monster tractor, one of several such homemade vehicles.
In the course of their constant search for productive uses of the land, my parents one summer stumbled upon the idea of growing cucumbers for pickling. Growing cucumbers is easy; growing an acre and a eighth of them for pickling is not. The pickling factory bought them at prices that varied in inverse ratio to their size. The best price by far were for those barely larger than one's finger. The ordinary cucumber of the magnitude one would find in a grocery store was well past its pickling prime and brought the least per pound. The time between the former and latter state often appeared to require less than a day.
Fortunately, the task was so great, and required so many pickers, that my parents could not discover individual responsibility for careless plucking. After all, it could easily have been one of the numerous house guests dragooned into the operation. On one occasion, even my grandfather appeared in the field in his black tie and black suit to pick for awhile.
At the end of the morning, my brother and I would load hundred of pounds of cucumbers into a 1941 Plymouth station wagon and haul them to Portland On the way back we would pass five widely spaced small red signs with white lettering. They read:
Big
new tube
Just like Louise
You get a lot
In every squeeze
Burma Shave
My parents were reading Malabar Farm by Louis Bromfield, in which Bromfield described his experiments in organic agriculture, and my mother had become something of a health food fanatic…. Long before Silent Spring, long before the word ecology was in general use, my parents became organic farmers. And I, while initially skeptical of some of the principles that underlay the effort, was more than willing to earn money and escape the regimentation of the big house by working all day on its farm.
I spent some of one summer driving a tractor back and forth over a 50-foot long, 40 foot wide, 15 foot high box built of railroad ties, compacting the silage underneath. It was called a trench silo even though it wasn't really in a trench. The first summer Kathy came to Maine, she was taken immediately to view my father's latest silos, which were huge mounds of hay covered with black plastic. The air was sucked out of these mounds by one of my mother's vacuum cleaners. The vacuum cleaner didn't survive the summer and the silos lasted not much longer.
Sometimes even worse happened. One summer, Kathy and I arrived for a vacation to find my mother, then a widow, in a small frenzy. Fourteen of her cows had died that morning. There was no explanation, although there was an immediate suspicion that planes from the Brunswick Naval Air Station had dumped something on the land. The next morning, my family, including our two small sons, were dispatched to the animal morgue at the University of Maine in Orono with cow parts in a picnic cooler and samples of their feed. We arrived before breakfast and in our search for the right office ended up in a room occupied primarily by a large table on which lay a dead and partially deconstructed horse. I moved quickly and queasily on, but my sons lingered, eyes unblinking, thinking whatever thoughts the young have when they first see death up close.
The cause, the university reported some days later, was, Sudax, the experimental feed the farm was using. Sudax, which is basically corn without the cob, is rich in nutrients. But little known at the time, it can -- under extremely moist conditions -- generate arsenic. This, in the wake of an extremely wet few weeks, is what it had done.
o
My father was a lawyer and in 1960, two years before the publication of 'Silent Spring,' CMP had come right through his property spraying the vegetation around the power lines with pesticides. My father was incensed.
I was home in Philadelphia the evening that my father tried to find a Maine lawyer to take the case. He started with the most famous and was shunted over the course of the evening to five others. Each declined to get involved; for each was on retainer to CMP.
Somewhat in desperation, my father turned to the town lawyer, Paul Powers, whose stock in trade was land sales and wills. Together they forced an agreement from CMP four years later in which the company promised not to spray anyone's property anywhere in the state if they were not agreeable. The Brunswick Times Record ran an editorial stressing the environmental significance to the state; it was headlined "Mr. Smith and You." And CMP paid my father $1,000 for his troubles.
o
The farm eventually grew to about 900 acres -- nobody ever seemed to know for sure. My parents added a hundred campsites and gave two hundred acres of the woods for a state park.
As he reached his seventies, my father started to slow down. He had a heart attack and died.
My mother was well prepared to take over but some of her own cows were pastured on rented land near the Brunswick Naval Air Station, then key to our strategic defenses against the Soviet Union. It had around 40 planes and two dozen atom bombs. One day the commanding officer called heatedly to say that 17 of her cows were blocking the main runway of the air station. His tone and rhetoric implied that if America were to lose the Cold War, my mother would bear major responsibility.
My mother was too well-mannered to ask the captain what sort of national security he was providing if 17 cows could break through his perimeter. Instead, she promptly dispatched the farm manager and Jim’s father, Charlie Degrandpre, to retrieve the strays.
The captain, however, forgot to tell the guards at the main gate that a farmer in a pickup would be by to get his cows off the runway. The guards were thoroughly skeptical of Charlie's story, and thus Charlie, unlike the 17 cows, was denied immediate access.
The impatient captain took command in the best heavy-handed naval tradition. He ordered the base fire trucks to the runway with sirens blaring. The cows, quite naturally, took to the 3,000 acres that surrounded the airstrip and were not seen again for a week, when, early on the Sunday morning of the officers invitational golf tournament, they turned up en masse on the 9th green.
Before she died, my mother gave the farm and her home to the University of Southern Maine. The USM president, who had cajoled my mother into the deal, was soon selected as chancellor of the state university system and his USM successor, an English professor from Baltimore, would tell friends that she was embarrassed to have cattle under her.
After my mother died, the farm deteriorated despite the efforts of a small foundation that she had established to help its work and which I came to head. Charlie DeGrandpre, who had raised four sons on the farm, was about the most respected man in Freeport, and had worked for my parents for more than twenty years, became increasingly frustrated in the mindless, memo-rampant world of a large academic bureaucracy.
The farm belonged to another world, which the university neither understood nor respected. It could not understand, for example, why Jimmy DeGrandpre would come from his real estate office and, tieless but still in his white shirt, help his father load bales of hay late in a hot summer afternoon. The main job of an administrator at USM was to keep his or her job. Doing something that wasn't your job was beyond comprehension.
Charlie eventually retired. He was replaced, with no little prodding by my siblings and myself, by his son David. David co-owned R & D Automotive with his brother Rich. He had learned business and computers at the University of Maine and farming from his father.
I tried to advise USM President Pattenaude of what was happening, ranging from violations of the deed of gift to practical problems. I became increasingly angry, not just because the deed of gift was being blatantly ignored, not just because I was being lied to, not just because the farm was being badly mismanaged, but because over nearly fifty years almost everyone who had anything to do with the farm or the neck upon which it sat regarded the place as something to care for, to respect and treat kindly, if not, in fact, almost sacred.
To the university it was just another facility. And the people who cared about it were intrusions on orderly management. When I proposed a modest summer ecology project on a couple of acres of farm land, a dozen local people quickly began meeting to organize, including the director of the state park, the head of Freeport Community Services and of Freeport Community Education. A contractor not only offered a 12'x30' shed but the free use of his crew one day a month.
When we took the proposal before the university the first reaction was from its lawyer. There were, she said, serious liability problems.
"Let's cut to the chase," I said. "we've already looked into that and we can get, and have money for, insurance for $750."
The dean then gave the real reason. "It's the camel's nose under the tent," he said. The real issue, it turned out, was control. Finally, we had to give them the power to screw it up and they did.
After a hostile exchange of op ed pieces in the Portland Press Herald with Pattenaude, I resigned as president of the farm foundation.
o
I feared the whole experience with the university and the farm would sour me. But the restorative powers of the land and the water soon took hold. I stopped wondering about scattered picnic benches and skewed budgets and began again examining closely the field pine near where the road to our house turns.
Both my parents had died on the neck. My 25-year-old nephew had been killed in an accident four miles up the road. David DeGrandpre, my brother in a failed chase to a dream, had fallen to his death from a ladder a mile the other way. And yet it still seemed all right, still beautiful. And it was.
