Maine
Tales.
Katahdin: A Land
Apart.
Sherman, Circa 1937.
Without
question, the
undisputed monolithic icon of northern
Maine is Katahdin. The coast has lighthouses as their
beacons. Rising
from the Maine woods we have Katahdin.
Both
are there to guide. While Katahdin is seventy miles southwest of
Wood
Prairie Family Farm, the mountain is so prominent that it's top can be
seen in
this
region
on clear days from
our highest hills and peaks.
Katahdin
Travels
Last week I had an
organic meeting in central
Maine and drove south along I-95 past Katahdin to get there. This 115
mile
stretch between Houlton and Bangor took ninety minutes to drive.
Back two
hundred years ago it took Indians and pioneers two weeks of canoe
paddling to
complete a similar journey.
Earlier
in
the week northern Maine had been clobbered with a storm that dropped up
to a foot or two of snow. As often happens, the
deepest snow fell in
the Katahdin valley – the sparsely populated townships near
Katahdin and the area
whose weather is seriously impacted by the impressive Katahdin.
Driving
down early, the morning was calm,
crystal clear and hovering around zero. The snow had been wet and the
days
since the storm had been uncharacteristically windless so clinging now
solidly
frozen to the boughs of the spruce and fir trees was a 4-5 inch layer
of
pristine white snow, every bit as perfect and unbelievable as a
painting on a
Leanin’ Tree Christmas card.
The
snow on
the highway shoulder was piled deepest as I approached the southern
boundary of
northern Maine – that would be the Penobscot River
– where our familiar land
ends and that different world begins.
One
of our
last towns this side of the Penobscot and staring right into
Katahdin is Sherman, Maine, a small outpost in the Maine woods.
One Room Schoolhouse
Years
ago
we had a
friend who as a new teacher taught in a one room schoolhouse in Sherman
in the
shadow of Katahdin back in the 1920s and 1

930s.
Twenty five
students,
K- Grade 8,
ages five to fifteen, three foot to six foot tall, all crowded into a
thinly
boarded mightily spare wood building, lacking insulation and outfitted
with an
almost adequate woodstove.
There
was
nothing between the schoolhouse door and the breathtaking view of
Katahdin
except for some fast moving air. When it was snowing outside and the
wind was blowing a gale it was also snowing inside that bare little
schoolhouse.
Like
most northern Maine towns Sherman was a
woods township with the cleared ground planted to potatoes and oats.
While unique
to northern Maine but common to the Katahdin valley, Sherman also had
farms
where dairy was bigger and potatoes was smaller, due to the
fact
that as you get away from the sandy loams up north comprising the
center of the
Potato Empire, the cleared ground was not as well-drained or early and
therefore
more fit for growing sod for hay and pasture.
Pronouncing Katahdin
Now, most
any place
pronunciation is independent and unruly.
Subtleties
are embedded in local dialect.
Take
“Katahdin” for instance.
It’s
an Indian word which means “Greatest Mountain”, which
explains why we
don’t call it Mount Katahdin (Mount Greatest Mountain is way too
many words for a
northern Mainer). Maine is quite partial to bestowing its iconic names
on
creations that are a source of pride. Of course,
there’s
Katahdin hair sheep. Then when the era’s best potato variety
came along, it
just seemed to make sense when it was released in 1932 to call it
“Katahdin”
(You’ll find our
Onaway
potato has Katahdin in its parentage).
Fact is,
Mainers
are particularly brutal when it comes to handling
‘Rs’.
Folks
down along the coast tend to lose them
(Bar Harbor sounds out as "Baa Haabaa").
Folks
up here in northern Maine tend to grab them floating
‘Rs’
and stick

‘em onto
words to make the process of speaking go
along faster
(“Goin’ down to Auguster,”
“Headin’ up to Madawasker”). The upshot
is we have a
short season in northern Maine and there’s no point wasting
time saying out real
long words when a short version would do just fine. Nowadays,
we’d allow that
Katahdin is still spok
en
every day in Maine potato country
conversations (“Got
me a load of Katahdins to put up the fore noon,”
“Naw,
them Superiors not nearly as late as a Katahdin,”
“That one
thar don’t take to blight near as quick as Katahdins”).
So for many reasons
there’s a pile of practice and daily experience behind the
northern Maine pronunciation of Katahdin.
Without any
pride
of mastery the original Katahdin of three syllables has been reduced
down a tad to about one and a half. A well placed ‘R’ shortens up
that tedious (‘tedjus’) long
middle syllable. Phonetically speaking,
'Ktardun'
(Note: no pauses; quick start with a forceful ‘Kt’
sound; must
be spoken fast, as though you’re in a hurry, after all
winter is always
on the way).
School Days
Here in
Maine back
before World War II, schools started up in November after cold weather
brought the farming
season to an end. School continued through winter ‘til mud
season in the Spring,
allowing families to gear up for the farming season once the mud dried
up. Well,
the 1920s had been real good years and then the thirties were very very
tough.
To help
their families make ends
meet most of the boys in Sherman school ran traplines for beaver and
fox
pelts.
They’d
tend these traplines
before school and show up at the schoolhouse laden with pack baskets
full of
pelts
and traps and of course snowshoes, rifles and knives.
The
pelts and snowshoes were parked outside leaned up against the
schoolhouse.
By
negotiation and mutual
agreement the guns, knives and traps were stowed under the
teacher’s desk.
These
were an outdoor people and these
were outdoor kids. Katahdin was their constant companion.
Katahdin
was their guidepost in the woods and
the center of their frigid world.
The Outside World
Back in
the
1930s
in places like Sherman, electric power lines to farms were still
decades away.
But
the
invention of battery powered radios
brought to folks in Sherman and rural America the new option of a
revolutionary
glimpse into the wide outside world through radio broadcasts.
Three
generations ago the most famous radio
personality was the renowned world traveler and story teller Lowell
Thomas.
Beginning
in 1930, his regular national radio
broadcast “Lowell Thomas and the News” carried on
NBC and CBS, continued for
almost five decades. Lowell brought into view
foreign
places like Cairo, Cripple Creek and Katmandu. To backwoods Maine
school kids
who’d never imagined venturing away from home, adventurer Lowell Thomas
came to possess
god-like status and gravitas.
That
is,
until the day Lowell's story telling brought him to northern Maine.
Blow after Blow
Most
of Lowell’s listeners didn’t realize it but he was
what’s known as a “cold
reader”.
He would
most often read scripts
live on the air that someone else had written without ever having
pre-read the
text. And most times he performed impeccably as the master story teller.
Well,
one day Lowell’s subject turned out to
be the wilds of northern Maine.
With
Sherman ears attentive like never before, his story unfolded. He soon
made
reference to Katahdin, royally mispronouncing it repeatedly as
‘Mount
Cat-ta-din’ and kept
right
on a-readin' the script in complete
and total
oblivion to his
stunning blow after blow of error. At the first blunder every jaw in
Sherman dropped.
From
five
year old listener on up there was instantaneous
shock in Sherman: this god of the radio waves rambling along
didn’t know what the
heck he was talking about.
Cold Winter
Day
It
had been a cold winter day in Sherman.
The
kids
in Sherman got a big
real world education they hadn’t
bargained for when they
crawled out of bed that morning. At
the
end of the day some of their innocence was left behind. Yet they were
now a notch
wiser to the ways of the outside world. And maybe j

ust a
little more
hesitant
to cross over to that far shore of the Penobscot River.
Jim