My VW Bug
Trip to Maine

by David Robert Crews

Part One
 

In June of 1970, I was on military leave from the U.S. Army and was spending a week up at Katahdin Lodge and Camps in Patten, Maine. My Uncle Finley owned the Lodge and I had worked there for him and my Aunt Martha during the year previous to me entering the Army. In May 1970, I had graduated from U.S. Army Photographic Laboratory Technician School and was assigned to report to my new duty station on Okinawa in June. While I was attending photo lab tech school, I had bought a white 1961 Volkswagen Beetle with a sunroof. Man o’ day that VW Bug was fun to drive.

After having the finest kind of time at the party, some friends of mine followed me, in their car, the twelve miles out the Shin Pond Road from the cabin to the town of Patten. There were no stop signs or red lights on that two-lane country road nor any traffic on it at night. And due to our finely honed Northern Maine Driving Skills, us 18-20 year old kids in those two cars knew that there weren’t no real danger in the Bug acting like its fuel tank was full of Mexican Jumping Beans. We thought that the Bug’s antics were hilarious.

The drive took at least twice as long as usual, but we made it into Patten OK. I drove the 11 miles from town up the North Road to Katahdin Lodge without an escort, because I had stopped worrying about the car totally breaking down. Didn’t seem like it would, and I could get help at any house along the way. I made it home just fine.

Next morning, I drove my zany Bug sixty some miles north to the closest VW repair shop, which was up in Presque Isle. The roads that I had to drive on had very little traffic on them and very few homes or businesses along side of them. There was one stretch of road that went for thirty-five miles through uninhabited woods. But, I was very familiar with it all and most anybody driving through there would have stopped and helped me if the Bug had conked out.

 
A mechanic at the shop replaced the voltage regulator, I paid him, and then I started driving back towards the Lodge.

My VW Bug drove just fine almost all the way through the tiny City of Presque Isle. Then it’s motor died out completely. I shifted my dead Bug’s transmission into neutral and drifted off of the main road onto a side road and saw that there was a deep dip in that road with a stream running through a culvert underneath the road at the bottom of the dip. So I coasted down the near hillside of the dip and tried to start the car by popping the clutch out with the transmission in second gear. No go.

 
The hillsides of the dip were three or four car lengths long and about forty-five degrees steep. I pushed that Bug up the opposite sidehill as far as I could muscle it then hopped in the driver’s seat while it rolled down the hill and popped the clutch out but it’s engine just grumbled at me. I repeated this show of hardheaded determined strength several times.

 
Carefully watching all of this was a great big ole’ middle aged guy doing some mechanical work on a dump truck that sat halfway in the door to a garage which was located about thirty yards off on a side street that ran parallel to the stream at the bottom of the dip. He kept lookin’ over at me with quizzical interest as if he was willing to lend me a hand if he could help me but didn’t know if I did need or would accept his help.

 
I was huffin’ an’ puffin’ an’ sweatin’ and cursin’ lowly to myself and leaning on my lifeless Bug in near defeat when a car that had to drive around me stopped. An older woman driving the car asked me if I needed some help. I was too flustered and hardheaded to say yes, but she quickly convinced me that I wasn’t gonna get the Bug started by pushing it up and down that hill. She pointed to the Big Fellow, who had been working on the dump truck but was now standing straight up and looking intently at the woman and myself, and told me that the garage there was part of her family’s business. She said for me to hold on and then went up and had the big guy come over with the dump truck and tow my Bug and me up to the front of their garage.

 
The Big Fellow was as nice and accommodating as a person could be. He was the main mechanic for the Helpful Woman’s business, which included the dump trucks there in the garage among other things which they did not elaborate on. I could tell that I was being helped out of my exacerbating situation by one of the larger commercial concerns there in that part of Northern Maine. He had me open up the hood on my Bug and then he took a look at the ignition points. They were just about fried. He went into the shop and brought out a small file and trimmed most of the burnt metal part of the points off then adjusted them up neatly with a screw driver so that the Bug cranked right up when I hit the starter.
I tried from several different angles to get the Big Fellow to take a little quick cash for getting me going again. He wouldn’t take it on behalf of the business because the Helpful Woman boss lady was still at the garage and she had seen me try to do this and had emphatically shook her head and said no to the Big Fellow, then she walked back into the garage. So then I offered it to him for his extra time and effort, he refused that then he would not even take it for a cup of coffee and a sandwich nor would he let me go and get him a coffee and a sandwich.

 
I am still thankful to those two Finest Kind of Mainers.

That’s the way it was in Northern Maine back in 1970; people helped each other out when ever they could. And I still adhere to that principal of good living even though most regular citizens, in far too much of America, nowadays find it strange to even see someone helping strangers in need. I haven’t been up to Maine since 1979, so I can’t say how generous and caring folks are up there today. But I imagine that it’s still just about the same as it was back in the olden days.

I drove on back to the VW shop and talked to the mechanic there. He didn’t have time right then to replace the points.

 
It now sounded and felt to myself and the mechanic that the Bug Car was running plenty smooth enough to make one nonstop trip down the sixty plus miles of two lane country hardtop road, which traverses the bodacious Maine landscape between there and Patten, if I drove mild and easy, which I was able to do. As opposed to the hard and fast way that I normally drove those roads in the unbelievably safe manner that had been taught to me by my uncle and the other expert Northern Maine drivers, whom I often rode with up there. We knew eggsactley how to take every bouncy-whupdy hump, hill, dip, frost-heave, Nascar style perfectly banked curve, turn or straight away of those slender strips of black tar just as quick and nimble and comfortably and thrillingly as a Bobcat pursuing one of them speedy-little Red Squirrels through the woods at lunch time.

 
So I bought a new set of points and struck out for Patten instead of waiting around all day in Presque Isle for a chance that that mechanic could fit my point change into his busy schedule. I knew that there were several mechanics in Patten who would be willing to do my point job while I hung out with some of the Town’s Folk there whom I had come home on leave to be with.

After that nice, easy drive, I was quite well relaxed and contented when I pulled into Patten about and hour and a half later.

 
After all:
1.) I had recently made it through the Army’s basic training then their Photo Lab Tech School with high enough grades for me to make the rank of Specialist Fourth Class with just ten months of military service to my name. That’s darn quick. I had been assigned Okinawa as an overseas duty station, and not Vietnam.

 
2.) I had a beautiful red haired nursing student steady girlfriend, whom I was truly in love with, waiting anxiously for me down in Maryland. Good thing that she couldn’t know about me chasing and catching a pretty Patten girl or two that week or conversely that the respectable Patten girls didn’t know about my true love, whom I wasn’t being totally true to.

 
3.) But shoot man, I was young and horny with an eighteen-month tour of duty on a distant Asian island about to begin. I knew that our young love had little chance of lasting through that long of a separation. And in all of my worldly travels I still have yet to meet a more attractive female portion of a local population than the one born and raised around Patten, Maine. I couldn’t help myself when it came time to resist the charms of those country girls.

 
4.) I was happy to have a legitimate reason not to go straight back to the lodge because my aunt and uncle had self-servingly gotten me to start working for them guiding bear hunters again the minute that I had arrived at their lodge five days before. I had worked for them during most of the fifteen months that fell between my high school graduation in Maryland and the day I gave my oath of allegiance to the Army. It was as if I had never gone and joined the Army to do my duty and was now on vacation from that job. Sheezzsh, relatives!

5.) Arriving back in Patten on such a sunny, sweet aired summer afternoon, as it was that day, and pulling into Ballard’s Citco Service Station where ace mechanic Junior Porter was busy workin’ in the mechanic’s bay and some of the local boys whom I had had great times with, in the year before I entered basic training, were hangin’ about the gas station enjoying Patten’s surprisingly active small town life, was simply stupendous.

 
Ballard’s Citco was one of the best spots in town to hear the latest gossip or the oldest tall tales. Arnie (short for Arnold) Ballard, the owner’s son, had become one of my best friends during the time that I had lived in the area. I used to hang out with Arnie and the other guys at the Citco quite a lot. I had enjoyed a fair bit of my time in Maine running around the countryside with those hellacious characters.

I was right where I wanted to be at the time.

I parked the Bug and walked into Ballard’s Citco’s service bay. Junior looked up from a chain saw that he was repairing for one of the local professional lumberjacks and said “Well hellooo theah Dave. How the hell are ya’?”

“Not bad, not bad at all,” I replied, then added, “But by jeeze I just had one wicked wild ride up ta’ Presque Isle and back.”

Then I verbally sketched out the particulars of my day up to that point in time, putting a lightly humored spin to it, and he chuckled a bit and grinned, all the while concentrating on fixing that broken down chain saw.

 
Junior Porter was from ancient Maine stock. He and his family had lived their entire lives going through the trials and tribulations of making a good life for themselves in the sparsely populated Northern Maine Woods where every modern up to date facility and convenience seemed to always be somewhere way up or down the road. He knew that the aggravations that I had experienced that day were all part of what a person had to endure if they wanted to live as far from a big city as possible.

Junior was darn good company if you didn’t crowd him any. After a short while, he had me back the Bug up to one of the garage bay’s doors and we popped its hood. He started into to doing the point job with serious intention. It wasn’t long, maybe ten to fifteen minutes, and he had me cranking up the Bug’s engine. It ran with that rattlin’ purring sound that air-cooled Bug motors have.

 
I looked back through my open driver’s side door and told Junior that I needed gas too. Then asked him, “How much do I owe ya’?”

He waved his hand at me and muttered, “Nuthin’.”

A teenage buddy of mine, who worked there to pump gas for Mr. Ballard’s customers, had been standing near us when I said that, and as I started the Bug moving towards the Citco’s gasoline pumps he walked along side the Bug, patted it on its roof and said through the passenger side window, “All right Dave, she’s runnin’ good!”

 
The Bug made it a good thirty feet before the engine quit running again.

 
I got out of that onry Bug and looked over at my buddy, then at the boys hangin’ out in front of the place, gave them a big mischievous smile, threw my hands up into the air in mock defeat and sort of growled at those rotten, mysterious forces up in the sky that were trying to ruin my chances of getting back to Maryland with enough time and money to still have a nice visit with my family, friends and girlfriend.

Junior had walked back into the garage and started into repairing that chain saw again. But he had seen and heard what the Bug had just done.

I walked in towards him and he looked around me out into the sunlit gas station lot, pointed a screwdriver, that he was using to work on the saw with, at my car and said, “Well just leave ‘er sit there for now. She’s out of the way enough.” He had a look of concerned, mild frustration on his face. Then he moved the screwdriver in a sweeping motion over his work bench and added, “You can see I got this one and them two saws theah to work on for some guys who need ‘um to go back to work in the woods in the morning. I promised to git ‘um done today. You ain’t in any hurry are ya’?”

“Heck no.” I replied. “Them chain saws are a lot more important to those guys then my car is to me. They gotta make a living with their saws.”

 
I’ve always had, oh you might say, ‘a good sense of proportion’.

Then I perked up a little more than I already was, because as I then said to Junior, “I got all day. An’ I sure as hell ain’t in no hurry to get back up ta’ the lodge, ‘cause they’ll just put me right to work. Man o’ day, I’m gonna walk up (Main St.) and get me somethin’ ta’ eat and enjoy myself. In two weeks I’ll be half way ‘round the world from here. Don’t know as I’ll get along so well with them Asian girls as do with the ones here in Patten.”

He grinned a bit, shook his head a shake or two and had a quick, warm, flash memory of his cattin’ days before he had fallen in love with the right woman, married her, and then started making and raising their babies.

 
It was a great afternoon in town for me. Nothing more than usual happened while I enjoyed my day. I went into the drugstore and had me a soda and sandwich at the lunch counter. A couple of local folks were already there, having long before that finished their lunches, and we all conversed happily amongst ourselves along with the friendly lady working behind the counter.

 
I fed some coins into the jukebox, and punched in the numbers to some songs from that fantastic Top 40 Rock and Roll Music list of the late 1960’s. That provided me, the lady behind the counter, the pharmacist working at the medicine counter and the other patrons in the drug store with an upbeat soundtrack to the life going on around us. I’m telling you, it seemed like every time that I looked out of Patten Drug Store’s large front window, which was at the end of their lunch counter, when a great song was playing on that juke box, somebody in town was walking down the street to the beat of the music, which couldn’t be heard outside.

 
That little town had soul.

After my lunch and a nice long, relaxing social session was completed at the drug store, I strolled on back down to Ballard’s Citco making stops all along the way to talk to whom ever I saw who I knew, because I knew that it might be a long time before we ever saw each other again.

 
It was now close to suppertime for Patten.

 
By the time that I made it back down to Ballard’s, my buddy, the teenage gas station attendant, had gone home for the day and the guys who had been hangin’ around Ballard’s Citco were also at home sittin’ around their family’s tables getting ready to eat big home cooked meals, so now Junior was the only one there. If it had been after suppertime, there would have been another attendant and couple of the local boys hanging out in the place again shootin’ the breeze, but it was suppertime.

 
Junior was steadily working on the chain saws, when I walked back into the garage. We both knew that he still might be there getting them ready until after closing time at 9PM, so that the lumberjacks could use them saws to whittle down tall, standing trees into limb-less logs on the ground the next morning.

 
Respectfully, I chatted with Junior till he suggested that we take another crack at getting the Bug going again. He was a pleasant man to chat with, and I was still about as contented as I could be.

 
A car came in for gas and Junior muttered a little gurrr type sound, gave his a head a short shake, pointed towards the saws with his screwdriver, then at the gas pumps and said, “Ya’ see, now I gotta do that too until after suppertime.”

On the way back from the pumps, he walked over to the Bug and motioned for me to come over there too. He lifted the hood again and commenced to trying to get the points adjusted right. It’s an exacting task that is usually fairly easy to accomplish, but we just couldn’t seem to get them points set right. I would agree with him that they looked right, get in the driver’s seat, turn the ignition on, then listen to the motor cough and complain. After about fifteen minutes on that five-minute part of the job another car came in for gas.
As Junior folded the customer’s gas money onto the station’s wad of bills that he had in his hand, he glanced over at me and said, “Sorry, but I got to get back to them saws.”

 
And he did; so I went over and sat down on the window ledge in front of the station. Those lumberjack’s job had come in ahead of mine. Junior had a right to ask me to leave my car there overnight, but he had graciously chosen to accommodate me instead.

By and by, the evening station attendant, who was another buddy of mine, showed up.
I filled him in on what was up with the Bug, where I was heading to in a few days, how the bear hunting was going up at the lodge, and what ever I may have picked up in the way of local gossip while in town that day. He reciprocated with the same kind of info about his life. He talked about what he wanted to do after he graduated from high school the next year, mentioned that he had had enough of that small town life, and asked me a question or two about the Army. It was a pleasant conversation for sure.

 
Soon enough, Ole’ Junior came out of the garage and said, “Let’s git ‘er done.”

It wasn’t too long before I was siting in the driver’s seat revving up the engine and smiling thankfully at Junior. Again he refused an offer of payment for his work, I thanked him and he turned around and headed back into the garage.

 
I wheeled on over to the gas pumps and the attendant filled the Bug’s tank with fuel. I paid the kid for the gas and took off towards the lodge. The kid and I were waving and hollering, “So long,” to each other and the Bug went a good fifteen feet this time before its engine slurrrred to a complete stop.

 
The kid blurted out, “Oh no!”

I hit the steering wheel hard with the palms of my hands, cursed hard, then looked over at the garage door and saw Junior standing there with his arms hanging straight down and a little limp at his sides, his jaw was hanging a tad bit down and a distinct look of disbelief and mild aggravation was plastered all over his face. “Just leave it right there,” he said.
Junior went back to the chain saw job. I went back to hangin’ out with my buddy and a couple of other local boys as they moseyed on in for that evening’s session of swapping lies and swattin’ flies.

 
After Junior had relaxed enough from doing that somewhat less aggravating work of fixing the chain saws, he came out and asked the boys there if they wouldn’t mind helping me push the Bug over to the garage door.

 
Somebody braggadociosly said, “We should just pick it up and carry it.”

And we could have too, but Junior said, “You can prove what ya’ got by comin’ over ta’ my place and splittin’ a couple a’ cord of firewood if ya’ wanna, but pushing it will do just fine.”
We pushed it over there without any effort at all and in hardly any time at all, Junior finally got the Bug’s points adjusted right.

He told me to take a test ride around the block, and when I drove back into the Citco station he had the look of pure relief written all over him.

I hopped out of the Bug and asked, “How much do I owe ya’?”

 
It was not his fought that it took so long, but he felt kinda bad or embarrassed about it. I could see that he did. Some new parts simply do not want to go on a machine like they’re supposed to. Everybody who has ever done any amount of mechanical work has experienced this phenomenon.

 
Junior rubbed his chin and averted his eyes towards the ground.

“Come on, come on” I prodded, “You deserve something for all that crap you just went through.”

“A dollar fifty,” he said with firm conviction.

 
I laughed heartily, said, “All right,” then slapped a buck and a half into his palm.

 
During that five or six hours that I had my Bug in Ballard’s Citco Station that day, Junior had spent at least an hour working on it. I could hardly believe that he would only take one dollar and fifty cents for all of that.

 
I knew that I would be telling them up at the lodge about this as soon as I got there, and also that it would be one of the prime examples I was going to be using to tell my family and friends in Maryland and my Army buddies just precisely why I loved life in Maine.
 

Part Two
 

I started driving the refreshingly compliant Bug up through town towards the Lodge. It was now doing anything that my foot work on the pedals and hands on the steering wheel and stick shift instructed it to do. It was quite a relief.

 
Then I realized that as soon as I got to the Lodge my aunt and uncle would want me to change out of the clean, casual wear, checkered sport shirt and white dungarees, that I was wearing, and into some work clothes.

 
They had about a dozen paying sportsmen bear hunters at the Lodge that week. Those guys would soon be coming out of the woods after a day of bear hunting. It was a little after 6 PM, and the hunters had to come off of their bear bait tree stands before a half an hour after sunset, which would be around 9Pm. That’s an important time for bear hunting guides, because if any of their hunters shot at a bear that evening it was paramount to begin tracking any wounded bears as soon as possible, while the trail was fresh and easiest to follow.

 
Unfortunately for Auntie and Uncle (nya ha ha!), due to the facts that I was positively certain that my uncle and his top notch, long time Maine Guide Gary could handle any amount of work, that any successful hunters could create for them, just fine themselves, and that I was home on friggin’ leave from the friggin’ army and that I was friggin’ aye well in need of a good time, I went on and did what a soldier boy is supposed to do while on leave.

I only had two more evenings left to enjoy myself in Maine. Now, its not that I didn’t enjoy the company of those folks working and vacationing up at the Lodge, most certainly I had had plenty of fun with them that week.

 
The problem was that some sweet, lonely country girl there abouts somewhere was sure to be open to an invitation from me to go out and ride around that lovely Maine countryside, so that we could enjoy each other’s company for awhile. We might even go parkin’ back in on a secluded farm field or on a logging road that wasn’t likely to have any traffic on it till the lumberjacks went to work early the next morning. No traffic, that is, I would hope, except for other young couples riding around in their vehicles who would go on and attend to their own ‘personal business’, when they saw the insides of the VW Bugs windows all steamed up. Know what I mean? Weehahooo!!

I stooped at a pay phone and called the Lodge to let them know that I wasn’t stranded or wrecked and injured somewhere. The way that that car had been suddenly lurchin’ forward and then half staling out, as I drove out of the Lodge’s driveway that morning with everybody there watching out the dining room windows from their breakfast tables, it probably looked to them like I wasn’t going to make that substantial drive all the way up to Presque Isle.

 
My aunt answered the phone and said, “All right, uh huh, your gonna stay in town this evening, OK, thanks for letting us know.”

 
But, she didn’t say anything to the effect that I should be careful and have a good time. Nor did she kid me with a mature, friendly saying like ‘don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ or a friendly but firm ‘don’t do anything you’ll regret later’. Because, neither she nor my uncle, who was a Korean War Veteran and Army Reserve-National Guard life time member, were willing to allow me to just relax and be there on vacation from the Army, when they could get some free labor out of me. Freakin’ relatives!

I decided to get some booze for myself and possibly who ever I might happen to share that evening with. Of course, the legal age to drink alcohol is 21 years of age in Maine, but I was about 29 days short of my 20th birthday.

 
I felt like drinking vodka. In Maine the state owns the liquor stores, and they only allow so many per population in each geographic area, and there was one in Patten. I couldn’t go in there and hope that they didn’t ask for ID cards, because everybody in town either knew me or who I was.

 
Everybody always knows everybody else’s business in a small town. No friend or buddy of mine who was over 21 years old could buy me a bottle and not expect the State Store clerks to find out about it. The clerks were salaried state employees and not store owners, who could be motivated by profit to overlook someone else breaking the law, they would revoke the liquor purchasing privileges at that store for anyone who bought booze for minors.

 
If I wanted vodka, I had to drive over to the State Store in Houlton, Maine. It was 45 miles away, but I had made that drive plenty of times before to take care of business for the Lodge, go shopping, get a haircut, or take a date to the movies there. It usually took me about forty minutes to make the trip, so it was no big drain on my fun time in town that fine evening. Plus, I would arrive back in Patten just before the sun went down, and the privacy provided by the darkness after twilight would aid me in my pursuit of pleasure.

I arrived at the State Store feeling a little nervous but confident. I had been served alcohol there once before without being asked for an ID, because, to most people, I looked to be a year or two older than what I was.

It was a ballsey bluff. The store was on a country road on the outskirts of Houlton, there were no other stores or businesses close to it, which meant people usually drove right up to the front of it and parked where the clerks could see them get out of their vehicles.

 Driving up to the store showed any clerks inside there that I must have a driver’s license for an ID on me. Parking out of sight somewhere up the road and walking to the store would have raised the clerks’ suspicions, because they knew all of the local liquor consumers who lived within walking distance of there.

 
I walked in, up to the counter, ordered, “A pint of Smirnorf Red Label,” and the clerk asked me for my ID.

I immediately launched Plan B.

An Army buddy of mine had once bragged that, even though he was not yet legal drinking age, he would usually get served in his neighborhood bars, when he was home on leave, by showing his military ID. I told the clerk, “Sure, I got my ID right here,” and pulled that green Army ID Card of mine from my wallet.

 
He smiled and glanced down at it as if he only had to take a quick look at it, because he expected it to be a proper ID for the purchase. Then he squinted his eyes and looked real hard down at the spot on the ID where my birth date was printed.

 
“Wait a minute, you’re not 21 yet,” he quipped.

“I know, but I almost am,” was my assuring, hopefully convincing, somewhat sheepish reply.

He concentrated harder on the birth date and said, “Yeah, but not until next July.”

“I know, but I’m home on leave and I have to go overseas to spend eighteen months on Okinawa week after next, and I just, well, wanted to have one last good time, and,” I stopped talking, because it would have been pleading to say anymore, and I didn’t want the booze that badly.

Fortunately, there was no one else in the store at the time. The clerk thought about it quickly for a second or two, glanced around to double check that no legal customers had come in, and said, “OK, what the heck, you’re serving your country aren’t you? But don’t come back, that’s enough for you.”

Fifty minutes later, I was buying orange juice at the Patten IGA grocery store. Then, I got a big cup of ice at the hamburger stand on Main St., and drove off a little ways out of town where no one could see mix myself a mild tasting screwdriver.

 
I drove back into town while sipping on my mixed drink; low and behold I spy one of Patten’s most beautiful girls walkin’ down Main St.. Her maturing hips moved and looked like heavenly bliss to me. She did not have an exaggerated hip-shake, but it was enough of a natural female motion to get my hormones hoppin’.

She had a nicely shaped, trim, slender eighteen-year-old body. She was mighty attractive from the outside in and the inside out. We had known each other ever since I had moved into the area and we got along well with each other. She had been dating the same steady boyfriend since way before we met. I didn’t know him as well as her, because his job was located in some other town. He did not get to spend very much of his time anymore at the local hang outs, at cabin parties or the frequent rock n’ roll dances held at the Town Hall there in Patten or over in Island Falls, which his girlfriend and I got to do.

 
Around there, it was strictly taboo for any guy to even attempt to date or make out with a girl who was going steady; and the local custom was that after the third date everyone in town considered a couple to be going steady. But, I devilishly surmised that it was all right for me to stop and ask her if she wanted to ride around and have a drink with me.

 
I whipped the Bug on over to the curb next to her and shouted, “Hey (I can’t put her name in the story, she may have ended up marrying her boyfriend) do ya’ wanna go for a ride? Look what I got!”

Then I flashed the vodka bottle at her from down inside my car, so that it wasn’t obvious to anyone sitting on the front porches of the houses near by.

She was happy to take my offer; into my Bug and off she went with me.

We had ridden around together having fun before, but there had always been at least one other young person with us. There was always the local rumor mill to consider—for her to ride around with me without anyone else in my vehicle could give people something to gossip about and report to her boyfriend. But, we threw caution to the wind.

We got another cup of ice at the hamburger stand.

 
Then we cruised on out of town a little ways and commenced to get a little booze buzz on. We drove on the tar roads for about an hour or so having a good time.

 
I didn’t want to mess with her feelings for her steady boyfriend, and she must have figured that she could handle me if I did try to slip over the line that separates a young gentleman from being a Jody Man (that’s military talk), a fence jumping bull, a you know what.

 Unfortunately, the alcohol buzz caused me to loose control of my hormone flow, I got a hormonal rush and then a well controlled warm desire for her, which I had wisely kept to myself ever since I had met her, grew to hot to resist.

 
Next thing we know, we’re on a one lane dirt track heading for the woods at the edge of some farmer’s potato field bouncing around, inside the bug, laughing and looking at each other in wide eyed wonder at what we both figured was about to happen.

She pressed the palms of her tender hands into my right shoulder, and only a tad bit seriously said, “Oh no, oh no!”

“But I gotta pee!” I teased.

“Well me too, but then we have to get back on the road, I can’t let anybody see us down in here.” She replied with friendly seriousness.

 
I had picked a spot that I knew from making my rounds while putting out bear baits. It had an old, unused logging road that went off into the woods at the far edge of the potato field. I maneuvered the two wheel drive Bug, with practiced skill, down the rutted dirt farm field track and off into the woods as far up that rough ole’ logging road as I dared to go. It was absolutely not a time to allow myself to get the car’s wheels stuck in a rut or mud puddle.

We were hidden by the trees just well enough that the headlights from any vehicle driven on the tar road out there could not shine across the field and reflect off of the Bug’s red taillight lenses and reflectors. Any other young people driving around just having fun that night, but not paired up as boy-girl couples out to go parkin’ and making out, might see the reflections of the Bug’s reflectors and want to come back there and see who it was, just so that they could have something new to gossip about and to make fun of the embarrassed (and they hoped bare assed) couple for getting caught parkin’. Also, if the potato farmer who owned the field or one of his family or friends saw us back there they might want to check us out to make sure that we weren’t a bunch of beer drinking kids making a big mess by throwing our empties all over the place.

 
Them country girls have no problem with taking a leak out in the dark under a tree. She went to one side of the Bug and I to the other where we jovially relieved ourselves of kidney filtered vodka and orange juice.

 
After we had finished our personal tasks, we sat back into our front seats in the Bug, looked at each other calmly but questionably, then embraced and kissed.

 
I wondered whether or not that she had previously thought of me as a possible new beau if her boyfriend did ever break up with her. They seemed to be deeply in love with each other, so it was best to leave him out of the conversation all that evening.

 
We mixed another set of screwdrivers, and commenced to sipping our drinks and pursuing our passions. Soon, we had to climb into the back seat to get away from the steering wheel and stick shifter that kept getting in our way as the urge to merge roared so loudly inside us that we couldn’t think straight. We did our best to turn that Bug into a no tell motel.

 
It was a delightful dally into rampant hedonism. We went at each other with nearly complete abandon. The foreplay was far more fantastic than any she had experienced before. Her face glowed in the dark from the joy of her unprecedented sexual satisfaction. She was completely in love with her boyfriend, but for that moment she couldn’t help but love what I do when I do what I do.

 
We both had just felt the fireworks that go off during satisfied lust in loins, when she uncontrollably moaned the words, “Go ahead.”

Thank God that I had drank about twice as much of the Smirnorf Red Label Libido Oil as her and that my hormones were exploding like firecrackers during our intense foreplay because by the time that she was loosened up enough to go all the way, I was too limp to get there.

Neither one of us was using any form of birth control or protection, nor did we have any with us. Back in those days, up there in the somewhat isolated Maine Woods, it was not yet socially acceptable for an unmarried young lady to take birth control pills or posses other forms of protection from unwanted pregnancy. And I didn’t have any prophylactics on me, because I wasn’t expecting to get the opportunity to need one that night. The 1960’s Free Love attitudes of America’s happy hippies had not penetrated that deep into the North Maine Woods, no unmarried couples were living together around there yet and premarital intercourse in general was hard to come by in the Patten area at that time in history.
If we had conceived a child on that hot, hedonistic night it would have made a mess of our lives. Our families and friends would have been deeply upset and as angry as they could be. I would have been one guilty Jody S.O.B..

I would have been a very happy young man if she had been unattached, we had fallen in love, then dated for a long enough time to really get to know each other, then taken vows of marriage and had children together.

 
She and her steady boyfriend probably got married a year or two after that night of liquor loosened lust and are still happy together. My guess is that she became a wonderful wife and mother.

I took her home around 11 PM, which was a respectable time for her to be back in her house, because, naturally she still lived with her parents and unmarried siblings. Before she got out of the Bug, I told her that I wanted to see her again the next day. She was emphatic about not hooking up with me again. I agreed with her that all of the reasons which she gave me as to why it was a bad idea were good ones, but I was feeling delighted and devilish and told her that I was coming back to see again anyway. She wasn’t angry or upset, just sensuously surprised at how sexually satisfied she felt as a result of her indiscretion.

Then I drove on up to the Lodge and had myself a nice comfortable night of restful sleep.
The next day I awoke and put on my work clothes. Then, I went into the Lodge and ate breakfast.

 
Everyone was congenial to me, so I knew that no gossip about me being with the young lady the night before was making the rounds. Somehow we had gotten away with being alone together, for a couple of hours, out in my car, which in itself was plenty enough information to start a good rumor. It was OK for us to ride around together for a little while, but we should have only done it long enough to have found some other young Pattenites to hang out with and offer a drink of my vodka to. We had begun and ended our evening, of enjoying each other’s company, right there on Main St. where anyone could of seen us. We really lucked out when no one suspected anything or asked too many questions concerning our activities that warm (HOT!) summer evening.

Whenever I was at the Lodge, I took over caring for the horse, the seven hound dogs and two caged bobcats that resided there. They had to be watered every morning and I enjoyed attending to their needs. After my breakfast, I went out and filled their water pans full of fresh water and talked to them as usual in a soothing tone of voice. Then I helped my uncle and Gary load up some bear bait on the Lodge’s two pickup trucks and went out baiting with one of them for awhile.

 
We came back to the Lodge at lunch time, ate, then took the hunters out and put them on the baits with the freshest signs of bear activity on them. After that, we went back to the Lodge and I helped my uncle do some of the never ending outside maintenance work required to keep a place like that looking its best.

 
Around 6 o’clock I finally had to put my foot down and tell my uncle that I was going to get cleaned up and go into town. It was a Friday afternoon, with the traditional American Friday Night social activities about to commence happening down in Patten, and my last gulldang night in Maine before I shipped out to Okinawa half way around the world. My uncle quietly said, “OK,” to me about my finally knocking off of work.

While I was in the shower, Gary and my uncle drove off in one of the pickup trucks. They went on out to the area where our most distant hunter occupied bear baits were located that evening.

It was nearly 40 miles from the Lodge to those farthest baits. If one of the hunters out that way got a shot at a bear, it would take considerable time for him to follow normal procedure and get to a pay phone to call the Lodge to inform the guides there that their help was needed; then it was another forty-five minutes to an hour before a guide could drive from the Lodge to the bait; next the guide had to determine if the bear had been wounded, how badly, if it was a mortal wound, then follow the bear’s blood trail into the dark woods using a flashlight to see with, drag the dead bear out with the help of the hunter who had killed it and the help of any other hunters from near by baits. All of that meant that it would be close to midnight by the time they arrived back at the Lodge. It was more efficient to have a guide waiting at a predetermined rendezvous spot close to the most distant occupied bear bait, where they could meet up with all of the hunters in that area that night to check on their day’s hunting luck, and also to make sure that they all made it out of the woods safely.

After I had gotten myself a good hot shower, a clean shave, then brushed my teeth, gargled some mouth wash, deodorized my arm pits and splashed the scent of English Leather After Shave and Cologne on my face and neck, I dressed myself into some fashionable, casual attire, making sure that the color of my socks matched my shirt, I did a quick polish and buff job on my penny loafers and I slipped my feet into those freshly shined shoes. Then with great anticipation, of another steamy encounter with my beautiful partner of the previous evening’s secret, lusty escapade, I walked out of the Lodge towards my VW Bug.

All of a sudden one of the bear hunter’s cars came charging into the Lodge’s driveway. The car was driven by a 35-40 year old guy who had come on the hunting trip with his slightly older brother and 16 year old son. All three of them, the dad, son and uncle, were natural born hefty, pudgy city dwellers. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they were a trio of big dummies, but they weren’t the sharpest knives in the kitchen drawer.

 
I knew right away that they were most likely following the instructions, given to hunters placed on bear baits located close to the Lodge, to come in to the Lodge as soon as possible, after shooting at a bear, so that the guides can go right out and do what had to be done post haste.

 
The car was kickin’ up dust in the crushed cinder driveway and swayin’ from side to side on its loaded down suspension.

 
The car came to a sliding, dusty stop just as I raised my arm, with the palm of my hand towards them, and said, “Whoa, whoa! Hold up there! Did ya’ git one?”

 
I took a hard, quick look into the car’s interior to check on the health of its occupants in case that they were driving that way because one of them was in need of immediate medical help. They all three were looking at me with wide-eyed excitement bursting from their faces. Their faces were all flushed and flustered looking and their bodies were trembling from excitement. But nobody was obviously bleeding or dying of a heart attack or anything. No matter what, I was personally obligated to make sure that they weren’t driving that way and looking so shook up because one of them was accidentally gunshot, injured or in any way needing first aid and a ride to the nearest hospital.

 
A barrage of verbal mayhem came blasting at me from the car’s occupants. The teenager was in the back seat pointing at him self and saying, “I got one, I got one!” The father and uncle were stretching around backwards, as far as their protruding paunches would allow them, and pointing at the kid and repeatedly blubbering, “He shot one! He got one! “He shot one! It’s out in the woods! It’s out in the woods!”

I was highly amused at their overflowing show of emotion, but I only broke out in a wide, friendly grin and not uncontrollable, body bending laughter, because basically I am a polite person.

I told them to go inside the Lodge and tell my aunt that the kid took a shot at one. As they rolled the car up to the Lodge’s front door, my aunt stuck her head out of it and asked me what was up.

 
As I opened the VW’s driver’s side door, I told her that the kid had taken a shot at one. To which she haughtily replied, “Well David, aren’t you going to go check it out?”

This was par for the coarse, but I did my best to stand up for my rights.

I pointed down at the freshly shined penny loafers that I was wearing on my feet and said, “Marty? I don’t even have my boots on!”

 
No professional guide goes into the woods without work boots on his feet to stomp through the inevitable mud and tough, tangled undergrowth in.

Her face twisted cockeyed a bit and her question etched deeper into her face, so that it was repeated without words.

“Jeeze o’ wiz, I’m leaving for Maryland tomorrow morning. They (Gary and my uncle) can take care of it when they get back. I wanna go in town and have a good time. I’m home on leave for christ’s sake. Pretend that I’m not here.” Was my justifiable answer.

 
An injured or lost hunter would have received my complete, unreserved attention and maximum effort, but my help wasn’t needed for this.

 
She coldly stated the maxim, “But David, the hunters come first.”

That was absolutely true for me, when I had been employed there, but it really wasn’t my problem anymore.

 
When my aunt and uncle took the hunter’s money that week, my guide services were not figured into the equation of fair services for a fair price. I could have spent that week on leave anywhere that I wanted to, I never promised to donate it to their business. They never even offered me any spending money for the work that I did there that week. Fin was profiting from the hunter’s payments and Gary was paid to help him guide the hunters. They were the ones responsible for providing the hunters guide services, not me.

 
I had been willing to help out at the Lodge a little that week to pay for the food that I ate, to be with my uncle, to get out in the woods, to enjoy the adventure of guiding again, to have a reason to ride around that awesome Maine landscape, just for the fun of it, but I was on vacation from defending America from communist aggression and had to go back and do an eighteen month long tour of military duty in a foreign country. I deserved a break.

None of that mattered to my aunt. She only cared about the Lodge making a profit. I could see by the bitter, sour look on her face that if I did not give in to her demand, to do the other guides’ job, that she would make those final 16 hours that I had left, to enjoy Maine, as miserable as she possibly could. And you better believe that she was well practiced at doing that. All of us men who ever guided bear hunters for the Lodge had been the victim of her self-serving vindictiveness at some time, and it had ruined several of my days in the past.

There was no real choice for me to do anything other than tell the trembling three to follow me in their car, then drive the Bug to the kid’s hunting spot.

 
We got there in two minutes, because it was that close to the Lodge. Close enough for Fin and or Gary to easily check on later.

 
We got out of our cars and walked into the woods. The bait was about 80 yards in from the road. We walked in until we got to the tree stand that the kid had been hunting from, and I told them to stop and stay put. They huddled together in a tight little group like they were trying to hide behind each other in case a wounded bear attacked them. From there, the kid could point to where the bear was when he had shot at it, and I could check the ground for tracks and or a blood trail without those guys stepping all over the evidence.

 
There were definite signs that a bear had recently left there in a big hurry. The permanent layer of fallen hardwood leaves, that covered the ground there, had a clearly visible series of big scoop marks in it leading deeper into the woods, that were created by the bear when it had dug its powerful paws into the ground for maximum traction and high tailed it on outta there. Bears outright hate being shot at.

 
I was slowly, carefully inching along this set of bear tracks looking for any blood spots on the ground or leaves of the underbrush, when I found a little bit of slobbered bear drool.

Upon closer investigation it appeared that there might have been a tinge of red blood mixed in with the bear’s saliva.

 
That bear had decided to spit and git the millisecond that the kid’s first rifle shot rang out. He had taken two more shots at the fleeing fur ball, but it was looking to me like he had missed it completely.

 
I kept checking the ground from several angles though, because on previous tracking jobs I had found that a wounded bear can sometimes run a little ways before it starts bleeding enough to leave an obvious blood trail.

 
I was bent over forward from my waist, searching intensely for the smallest drop of blood, when all of a sudden, in a blurring flash of involuntary muscular action, my body sprung straight stock upright.

 
I had heard the sound of an animal making a short, strong huffing sound from about 20 or 30 yards down in the underbrush. It had caused that surprising involuntary springing reaction in me, because it was the same type of sound that several dead bears had made before, when we guides had picked them up and dropped them onto the Lodge’s bear skinning table and air was forced out of their lungs and up through their mouths. No doubt about it.

Consequently, my instantaneous unfiltered conclusion was that the bear indeed had been wounded and was laying about 20 or 30 yards off in the woods bleeding to death. That would mean that it was in too much pain to move unless it absolutely had to and had made the huffing sound to warn us that it was not going to allow us to come any closer to it before it attacked with all of the furry and rage that it could muster.

But this was too exciting and confusing to process in my brain as actual fact, because Wild Maine Black Bears rarely ever let humans walk up that close to them in the woods. They are called “The Ghost of The Woods” by old time Mainers, because black bears are the stealthiest, quietest, shyest, cagiest, smartest animal in those woods. I thought that maybe one of the trembling three had made the sound and it had echoed around in the woods and deceived me into thinking that it came from in front of me.

 
I turned to the tightly grouped trio and asked, “Did one of you guys just cough or clear you throats?”

 
Six widening eyes looked back at me and three nervously vibrating, timid voices each squeaked out the word, “No.”

I made an up and over pointing motion with my right arm up in the air above my head and my right index finger pointing towards the deep woods and with my voice hushed down to a barely audible level I said, “Well, I think that the bear is right over there.”

What happened next was like a slapstick skit right out of a Three Stooges Comedy.

 
The timid trio went completely pale in their faces, kicked their skittish quivering into high gear, started guplin’ and gruntin’ and moanin’ and groanin’ and those three big, wide and round bodies of theirs all took off in different directions right into each other. They had their arms up across their chests with their elbows digging into each other’s soft, naturally padded flesh like football linemen trying to make a hole in the opposing team’s defensive line for the quarterback to run through. The tops of their bodies from their waists up were all smushed together and their feet were kicking out clouds of leaves and twigs into the underbrush around them.

 
They became one, large idiotic looking creature in their haste to get out of there before a bear could come in and give them a thrashing punishment to avenge its painful wounds. Their arms got all tangled up and hooked together. The pressure that they were applying towards each other, from their attempt to quickly move in any direction that was away from where I had said the bear might be, overcame their ability to navigate out of each other’s way. They slowly, hilariously spun round and round in a tight circle several times.

 
My jaw was just about hangin’ down to my belt. My eyes were popping out from sheer joy. It was such an excruciating, rib splitting laughter type of thing to witness that even my reddening ears were damn near laughing instead of listening to the weird comical noises emitting from the three smushed into one creature. It would have been far to rude of an insult to bust out laughing at them though, so I had to hold most of it in and hide my enjoyment of their idiocy.

 
I was just about to loose my grip and fall down laughing when they disentangled from each other and hastily waddled off towards their parked car. They piled into the car, slammed the doors shut, quickly rolled up the windows and locked the doors so that the big bad bears couldn’t get ‘um.

It would have made Doctors Howard, Howard and Fine blush with jealousy to see themselves upstaged that way.

I paused there by the bear’s trail for a minute to ponder what to do next. If that bear was laying there not moving because it was so badly wounded that it was in too much pain to try and flee from us when it had heard and or smelled us coming towards it, then the bear was going to die real soon. I had never seen a wounded bear stop running from us guides till it dropped dead during any of the 40 to 50 times that I had helped my uncle and Gary track a wounded bear or the 15 to 20 times that I had done it by myself. If I went in and made the bear jump up and run it would have been much harder to find dead and retrieve. It may have gone into a swamp where it is impossible to follow a blood trail because of all the shallow water, or just outsmarted and eluded us by outdistancing us and going too far into the forest to be found in a reasonable amount of time.

I never carried a gun with me while tracking a wounded bear, because to condense what I just said, 99.99% of the time they either drop dead from their wounds or out run humans who are after them. I was not familiar with the three hunter’s rifles; I had never fired them. To go in after a wounded bear in order to see if it would stay put long enough for me to finish it off with one of their guns, and expect myself to be quick and nimble in case the bear did charge at me, would have been down right stupid. I was a professional, so I knew better than to dive into a death-defying situation without the proper equipment which I had considerable practice at using.

 
Another important thing that I had to consider was--did you ever try to walk in the woods wearing loose fitting shoes like penny loafers? They do not provide the support or comfort required to tromp around the uneven ground there that is covered with layers of loose fallen leaves and twigs, is strewn with rocks and is sometimes soft and muddy. It is inadvisable to go walking around in the woods expecting to have a run in with a wounded bear when you don’t have the best footwear on to shit and git if the bear turned on you. Add that to the fact that it is mighty cumbersome to carry a heavy, floppy dead bear out of the woods, and you can see why it would have been too risky for me to go any further in pursuit of that bear with a pair of low cut penny loafers on my feet.

 
My aunt had nothing to loose if I had twisted my ankle or sustained any other injury caused by my use of improper foot wear, because I was about to become unavailable to do her bidding and the Army would take care of my medical expenses if anything happened. Ya’ might say that my Aunt Martha was a warm hearted, caring person, but I wouldn’t.

I had not determined whether the kid had shot the bear or just thrown hot lead around in the air above it and scared the spit out of it. I did sensibly determine two obvious things, though. One, I was not adequately outfitted for the occasion. Two, that the timid trio weren’t in the mood to pursue the matter any further at that point in time.

 
Did I mention three? Three being that it was way, waaayyyy past time for me to roll out and go have a rockin’ good time in town.

 
I sent the father, son and uncle back to the Lodge in their car. Then I got into my VW Bug and motored on into town with a smile on my face and a longing in my loin.

 
I was smiling at the thought of the live Three Stooges Comedy, which I had just seen, at the memory of the night before and at the possibility of having another one just like it. Yes, I must admit that the longing was mostly physical. Although the beautiful young lady and I had always liked each other, and I found her to be immensely attractive in every way, it would have been ridiculously foolish of me to think that we could fall in love and be happy together. She was spoken for and that was that.

 
But, I was feelin’ frisky, devilish and immune to danger. The fact that I only had about 15 more hours, in Maine, to suffer any consequences from my Jody Man actions, during which her longtime steady boyfriend would hopefully be out of town, pushed my internal sense of gentlemanly behavior back onto the ungentlemanly side of behaving.

Soon as I entered the northern town limit of Patten, I spied my accidental lover walking on the sidewalk next to Main St.. She was about 200 yards away and going in the same direction that I was. Her back was to me, but I recognized her right away by the shape of her hairstyle, slender delicious body and by the way she moved in her own graceful, feminine way.

 
Before she saw me in the Bug coming towards her, she turned around on the sidewalk and began walking in my direction. She was walking slower than normal in a deliberate manner. It appeared to me that she was trying to make it look to other Patten residents like she was just taking a relaxing stroll out in the evening air. I instinctively surmised that she was out there walking back and forth where we would see each other as soon as I drove into town that evening. She was gossip-wise enough to be there in order to make sure that I did not have to knock on the front door of her family’s house to ask her to come out and take a ride with me. That’s a smart girl.

I slid my rolling no tell motel on over to the curb and stopped along side of my intended partner in hedonistic satisfaction. She sure as heck was beautiful.

I smiled a bit devilishly at her, she smiled pleadingly at me with a look on her face that told me she was thrilled by what I had done for her the night before, but we were not going to do that again. She opened the passenger side door and jumped right in.

 
She began to sensually rub the palms of her hands all over my upper body and arms and run her fingers through my short hair while alternately kissing me just below each of my collar bones and imploring me to, “Please understand that it would be too dangerous for us to go out again, we could be caught, its wrong, you’re not my boyfriend, it would be different if you were my boyfriend, it would be all right, it was great, it felt really good, I couldn’t believe it, I wish we could do that some more, but I don’t love you, you don’t love me, it would be OK if we were in love, I can’t believe we did that, please understand.”

I had my right arm around her shoulders and was stroking her clean, fragrant hair and the right side of her smooth, tender face while gently pressing my lips onto the top left side of her head. I fruitlessly attempted to think of a good enough excuse or shallow reason for us to be together again but all that I could do was say, “Yeah I know, but, OK that’s true, but, I know, I know, we could, but, you’re right, it would be, no one would, OK, OK, that’s best, I’ll go.”

 
This intense encounter only lasted about a minute and a half from the second that I stopped at the curb till my sensible friend got back out of my car and went on about her life as if we had never been lovers for one steamy session in the back seat of a VW Bug. Again our luck had held out. We had missed getting ground up in the rumor mill one more time, because although it was such a short time that we were sitting there it would have been plenty easy enough for someone to see us there from the comfort of a seat on their front porch or by glancing out one of the windows in a nearby house or by driving or walking by. It would have been blatantly obvious that we weren’t chatting about the weather; not a soul in town could have minded their own business and paid no attention to us.

 
I was satisfied with the way that she had talked good sense into me. She would have suffered the most, and for a long time, if we had gotten caught in each other’s arms. It would have been much easier for her to be forgiven by her boyfriend, his family, her family and her friends for one intoxicated mistake than it would have been for a second planned one. It was a lot more wrong for me to try and be with her again than it was the first time.
I puttered on down Main St. and found some of my buddies to spend the evening with. We rode, in the Bug, out past Shin Pond towards Baxter State Park to Fifefield’s Wildland Store.

 
Fifefield’s was about 20 miles from Patten. It had no electricity, because the power line did not go out that far. The store was lit by gas lamps and had a gas powered refrigeration system that kept a walk in cooler and a refrigerator nice and cold. It would have cost Ole’ Fifefield 500 bucks to have the power company run a line out to his place, which was too much for him to part with, when he could make it on gas power.

 
Fifefield’s was an old time general store that was stocked with items that were intended to be sold to people who went camping in and around Baxter State Park. Fifefield’s prices were so high though, that he rarely ever sold anything besides sodas, snacks and lots of beer. Everything on the store’s shelves was covered with a thick layer of gray dust.

 
There was an antique gasoline pump out in front of the place. You had to hand pump as much as five gallons at a time up into a clear glass globe then let gravity pump it down into your vehicle’s gas tank. I did that the first time I went there, for the unique fun of it, then when I told my uncle that I had he told me not to do that anymore because Fifefield watered down his gasoline.

 
Fifefield did sell a lot of beer though, because he sold it to anyone with enough money to pay for it. That old rascal even gave it to high school kids on credit. He served it to all of the local underage drinkers.

 
We hung out in Fifefield’s for awhile, each of us buying and drinking one chilled beer at a time. There was a rule at Fifefield’s that underage drinkers had to have a place right next to them amongst the stuff on the shelves to hide their beer every time a vehicle drove up to front of the store and stopped. The beers stayed hidden until either the person or persons in the vehicle were determined to be one of the other local beer slurpers or they came in and made a purchase then left. Come to think of it, every time that I was there swiggin’ a brew other beer drinkers were the only ones who came into the store.

Entertaining conversation was the norm at Fifefield’s. As the cold brew flowed down into the innards of the local boys hangin' there, hot dang hellacious tall tales flowed up out of them. It was a good place to relax and have a good laugh.

We went back in to town about 10 o’clock. Businesses in town were all closed by then. We had bought some six packs of beer at Fifefield’s, and along with some of the young Friday night partyers all ready in town sitting in their vehicles under the streetlights on Main St., we sat in the Bug and socialized till midnight.

I wanted to stay, sip beer, and hangout till 2 or 3 AM, then go eat a breakfast platter, down at the 24 hour restaurant located next to the Sherman Exit for Interstate 95, with a couple of my friends. This was our favorite way to cap off a Friday or Saturday night in town. But, I had to wake up early the next morning and drive to Maryland. I wanted to be feeling fresh and alert, so that it would be a safe, comfortable ride. Headaches and hangovers increase in leaps and bounds for me when I have to drive a long distance, so I said my farewells all around and drove on up to the Lodge.

After a good sound sleep, I woke up, took a shower, shaved and brushed my teeth. I looked at my reddish, watery eyes in the bathhouse mirror and figured that eating breakfast would cure my slight hangover.

I got dressed and walked into the Lodge’s dining room, sat down, and waited for one of the women working there to bring me in a plate full of fried eggs, bacon and home fries. My uncle, Gary and the hunters were all there and were at least half way through eating their breakfasts and they were chattering away to each other.

 
There were no dead bears hanging on the lodge’s game pole that morning, so I wondered whether or not The Three Stooges kid’s bear’s trail had been tracked by my uncle and/or Gary. I asked my uncle whether or not that he had checked on it. I thought that my uncle may have been holding off doing that till after breakfast because the kid’s bear bait was only two minutes away from the Lodge and there may have been other bears shot at by other hunters, the night before, that the guides had to check on and that could have taken a long time and tired them out.

My uncle said, “Yeah, we checked it out.”

His answer was rather taught, terse and short compared to the usual amount of genial information that one guide generally shares with another concerning a tracking job that they had both been part of. And, he averted his eyes from me as he spoke.
Several times previous to that I had tracked bears whose wounds did not start to bleed out till they had run a little ways down into the woods after being shot. I thought that was the reason why I hadn’t found any blood on the ground or underbrush but had heard that surprising huffing noise from down in the woods.

 
I asked if the boy had hit the bear with any of his shots.

He replied that, no, he and Gary had not found a blood trail.

 
Then he added something to his answer, in a bitter, muffled tone of voice, which I did not hear clearly. It was something to the effect the he and Gary had tracked the boy’s bear way, way out into the woods and then the bear just disappeared into thin air. Then he snickered and some of the hunters sitting around the table snickered rudely in unison with him in way that indicated that they understood the meaning of why he had just spoken to me that way and that they agreed with his point of view.

 
I realized that my uncle and the hunters had all determined, in my absence the night before, that I had pulled a fast one on The Three Stooges and scared them out of the woods, so that I could go have a good time doin’ what I shoulda been doin’ in the first place.

 
This was no shock to me. Like numerous times in the past, my uncle was falsely accusing me of something.

 
I had heard an animal, out in them woods, huff hot air out of its lungs. I had told The Three Stooges, when they were sitting there in their car the previous evening, hiding from the big bad bears in the woods, that if it was not the boy’s wounded bear that had huffed at us because it was too wounded to run, then it may have been another bear coming in to the bait that had huffed in our direction to warn us not to come any closer or it may have been a raccoon. If they were too shook up to correctly process that information, it wasn’t my fault.

The collective bullshit of the crowd in the Lodge’s dinning room didn’t bother me at all. I was feeling good. I was alert but relaxed. I perceived that no one there was too awfully happy to see me.

I looked all around me at their faces. They had a sneering aura of contempt on theirs, and I had a glowing little grin on mine, which was my way of saying to the all of them, “Screw you ignoramuses.”

 
They kept avoiding looking directly at me. I forked my food into my mouth calmly and casually. I couldn’t help but to keep trying to make any one of them unwillingly look me straight in my face by making different adjustments in the angle of the line of site between my face and any of theirs, because it made them feel real uncomfortable. Several of them ignoramuses who were sitting close to me finished eating at the same time and seemed to squirm uncontrollably while trying to squeeze up between their breakfast mates sitting on either side of them and remove themselves from my immediate vicinity.

 
I got a solid kick out of their conniptions.

 
I didn’t give a flyin’ flip what any of them thought of me. I was the Real McCoy. I had come up from the suburbs of Baltimore and made my mark in the world by becoming a Registered Maine Bear Hunting Guide and going so far as to track wounded bears by myself at night without a gun. Not one of those paying sportsmen possessed the woodsman’s skills required to do what I had done. One or two of them may have had the capabilities to learn how to do a guide’s job, but they weren’t one yet. I was doing fine in the Army and had lucked out on getting a good duty station. When I joined the Army, I had hoped to travel and see new places and exotic people and in about an hour from then, I was going to take off on a journey that would take me half way around the world from there. My inner self was having one big chuckle fest. I thought that them ignoramuses were hilarious.

As I sat there, I realized that seeing everybody acting so screwed up was a fair reward for my aunt and uncle. If those two relatives of mine hadn’t been so cold heartedly selfish and had let me enjoy my time home on leave by letting me pitch in and help out around the Lodge at a reasonable rate, then they wouldn’t be feeling mucked over in a quagmire of their own creation.

I had no mercy for any of them. If they were bound and determined to get that upset on behalf of three unjustifiably miffed individuals who were more suited to have gone to the beach and played unexciting little games like catch with a beach ball, on their vacation, instead of going bear hunting, then all that I had to say was: goodbye, I’m leaving now, I’m off in pursuit of a grand new adventure, I’ll send you all a post card when I get there.

All along, my aunt and uncle had simply refused to give me credit for being successful at the job that I did guiding for them. I had always gotten it done without getting anyone lost in the woods, hurt or killed. If they were going to come to another false conclusion without asking me what had actually happened then to hell with them, instead of wishing me good luck overseas in the Army, they could just as well kiss my ass goodbye.

 
I finished breakfast, went out and packed my clothes and stuff into the Bug, went back into the Lodge, said goodbye to my aunt and uncle and the staff working at the Lodge, walked back out and with a warm smile on my face and a Rock n’ Roll song in my heart I got into the Bug and headed on down the line feelin’ fine.
 

Part Three

 

I stooped at Earl Guiggey’s Esso gas station and general store in Patten, filled my gas tank, bought a soda and snacks, and enjoyed some of the usual small town conversation always being shared there amongst the local lads. It didn’t bother me at all, when I had to say so long to Earl and my other friends in the little store that had been one of my favorite hangouts. My week in Maine had been one hell of a trip, and my future looked as bright as my red headed girl friend’s pretty blue eyes.

 
It was a nice day for driving long distance on. The Bug ran clean and smooth. I stopped and filled the gas tank up, when I had reached an Interstate 95 rest stop about 200 miles south of the Lodge. I went into the restaurant there and bought something to snack on while continuing my trip. I walked back out to the Bug, got in, cranked up the motor, put the transmission in first gear, let the clutch out, drove about 60 feet and the Bug ground to a halt.

Shoot! I couldn’t believe it.

I walked back to the gas pumps where a station attendant was standing and leaning on a gas pump looking at me with a friendly grin on his face. I asked him about were the closest garage was that could work on the Bug for me. He told me the name of a gas station, that was located a few miles off of the interstate, which specialized in VW repairs and gave me directions to it.

I went back to the Bug and tried to get it to start up and run well enough for it to make it to the garage and save me the cost of hiring a tow truck to drag me there. The Bug wouldn’t do much besides start then stop running.

 
I ambled back to the gas pumps to ask the attendant which tow truck company I should call. He was talking to two guys gassing up their old SAAB. They asked me what was wrong with my car. I told them about my car having a new set of points and voltage regulator and that I wasn’t sure what the problem was now.

The two were brothers. One was a high school student and the other was about to graduate from Yale University. The brothers had just spent a few days at their family’s personal vacation lodge in southern Maine. They were heading home to meet up with the rest of their family and then go to the older brother’s Yale graduation exercises.

The older brother said that he would take a look at it if I wanted him to. I said that if he knew anything about mechanics that it was all right with me. He nodded his head, grinned and humbly said that he liked to work on old cars and that when he had gotten the SAAB it was a junker and he had restored it by himself.

His younger brother pointed to him and said, “He’s getting an engineering degree from Yale. He ought to know something about fixing your car.”

The Yale man found that the jeezly points were out of adjustment again. He tweaked them into running smooth as best that he could by ear. He said that I still needed to go to the VW repair garage and have them finish the job, or I might get stuck out on the interstate broken down somewhere. He refused a grateful offer of some cash from my pocket to help pay for his gas expenses and took off on to the interstate.

 
I drove to the next exit on the interstate and followed the station attendant’s direction to the VW repair shop. But, the shop wasn’t where his directions lead me. I was in a well-populated part of Maine, on a four-lane highway that had plenty of businesses, including strip malls and several gas stations, along side it. None of the gas stations sold the brand of gas that the attendant had said the VW repair shop sold.

I stopped at a gas station on that road to ask for directions to the VW repair shop, but the attendants there had no idea where it was.

 
The Bug’s mechanical mayhem was loosing its comical aspect and I was slipping out of the good mood that I had maintained for the past week. Frustration began to bubble up inside of me as I drove up and down that highway looking all over the place for the phantom gas station.

 
Finally, I stopped at a phone booth and looked in the phone book and found the number listed to the gas station that the attendant had said specializes in VW repairs. I called the number, a mechanic answered, and I told him where I was and what I wanted. He said that they had recently changed the brand of gas that they sold and moved to a different location. (AHH!! Jeeze o’ wiz Miss Magilicuty!!!) He gave me directions to the new location and I got there in several minutes.

There were three mechanics there working on two VW Bugs in the station’s mechanic’s bays. I casually let them know that I was traveling from Maine down to Maryland, mentioned that I was home on leave from the Army and told them that if they could fit me into their schedule that evening, I had the cash to pay them with.

 
I only had to wait about twenty minutes till one of them checked my car’s points. He started my Bug up and called the other two guys over to listen to it run. They called me over, from where I was standing off to the side not crowding or bothering them, and told me that the Yale man had set the points well enough by ear to allow me to drive all the way to Maryland without a problem from that, but the motor had a cracked valve in it and was only running on three of its four cylinders. They told me that the whole motor had to be dropped out of the car to do that job, but if I didn’t drive the Bug to hard and fast going home, that I could make it all of the way and be able to finish out the rest of my time on leave at home while the car was being fixed. Once again, I was told to keep my money in my pocket, and I thanked them all then headed back to the interstate.

That sidetracked me for over two hours. It also wore me down quite a lot more than any two hours of interstate driving did. It messed up the satisfying feeling that I was experiencing from driving towards Maryland at a steady pace.

 
I had driven the Bug from Maryland up to Maine in twelve hours. That was done by only stopping when I needed gas. I used the men’s room when necessary during fuel stops and only ate one short, sit-down meal in a restaurant. I stayed alert by drinking beverages containing caffeine and eating snacks while I was driving.

 
Also, my father had mapped out the shortest route possible between my childhood home in Dundalk, Maryland and Patten, Maine. He had proved it was the shortest in July 1967, when we made our second family vacation, road trip up to Maine from Maryland and had cut six to eight hours off of the traveling time taken up by the previous trip. The trick is to leave the simplicity of driving all the way on Interstate 95. Use a map to navigate west of I 95, where it follows the contours of the Atlantic Coast Line out to the east. It is more sensible to take different interstate highways that cut a shorter path through Connecticut, then get back on I 95 in somewhere in Massachusetts, New Hampshire or southern Maine. I forget where and a different route on new roads may be better today.

I shouldn’t have drank booze and stayed up so late the night before. It would have been smarter for me to have gone to bed early and woken up at daybreak then started driving south shortly after sunrise. Due to that indisputable fact, the Bug breaking down again, and me stopping in Patten that morning to gas up and goof off one last time at Guiggey’s Esso, I was a lot more tired than I had planned to be, when I was driving back down through Connecticut.

 
My head began to nod back and forth while my eyelids repeatedly tried to slide shut. I opened the sunroof and let cool, nighttime air flow around my sleepy head to keep me awake. I stuck my arm out the open driver’s side window and tried to scoop in rejuvenating blasts of air. It didn’t help much.

I was driving through low mountains on a long stretch of interstate highway that had no rest stops on it. Most of the roadway had guard rails in place along side it. If it weren’t for the guardrails, if a driver accidentally drove off the road to my right they would fly off of a mountainside and disappear into the trees, and if a vehicle drove off of the road to my left it would smash into an unyielding rock wall. There were two lanes of smooth roadway for the northbound traffic and two for the southbound with about twenty feet of grass covered medium strip dividing them.

 
I was holding on to wakefulness with all of my might, but I lost the struggle.

 
Next thing I know the swishing sound of tall grass and weeds rubbing against the bottom of the Bug is waking me up. I bolted straight up from being hunched over the steering wheel, and saw that I was traveling fast towards a huge boulder. I frantically down shifted from fourth gear into third then down to second, as I simultaneously tapped on the brakes with just enough pressure to slow the car down without locking up the brakes and going into an uncontrolled slide. The round top of a metal culvert, that was sunk into the ground and came out from under the roadway, was sticking up about eight inches above the surface of the ground in front of my unsafely driven car. When the wheels bounced over that the Bug hopped about three feet up into the air. Then I realized that there was just enough room between the Bug’s front bumper and an upcoming guard rail, placed as a bendable buffer between a boulder wall and unsafely driven vehicles, to maneuver back onto the road surface. I wrenched the steering wheel to the right and the Bug shot back onto the road as I glance to my left and in wide eyed wonder watched the driver’s side of the Bug miss the beginning of the guard rail by mere inches.

 
There were no other vehicles in sight as I drove back across the northbound lanes of the interstate highway, over the medium strip, and onto the southbound lanes where I belonged. The Bug was only moving about fifteen miles an hour, as I twisted my head around and looked back at where I had left the road. It was the only spot for many miles in either direction that did not have a guardrail implanted beside it. The mountainside there rippled back far enough away from the edge of the road to make a guardrail unnecessary.

 
What a fortunate set of circumstances that was. I declare that it was the only place along that long, long stretch of interstate highway where a moving vehicle could stray off of the road and not smash into a guardrail. Not only that, Lady Luck had also made sure that there were no other vehicles on that road anywhere near me during the whole episode.

 
Of course, you and I both know that it was only by the grace of God that it happened that way.

 
It was too dark and dangerous to pull off to the side onto the shoulder of the road and take a nap. There were no overhead highway lamps. The shoulder was only one thin car width wide, between the edge of the high-speed roadway and the guardrails. The road was so curvy and undulating, that by the time that the driver of any vehicle traveling at normal speed in the right lane on my side of the road could see me, parked there snoozing, they would have been nearly right alongside me. There was no room for the driver to make a mistake. If more than six inches of the side of their vehicle was straying over the white line, between the road and shoulder, it would have probably side swiped the Bug. That late at night tired drivers would be startled to see the little white VW suddenly appear at the side of the road so close to them and possibly over react and have an accident. I had to keep driving.

I put the Bug’s transmission into third gear and kept it there until I got to a rest stop. That way my speed would top off at about 45 MPH as the engine’s Rpm’s got so high that the engine would sound like it was going to blow up. That would continually remind me to ease off of the throttle and drive at a slow enough rate to minimize the damage if I fell asleep again and crashed.

 
The only vehicles that passed me by going southbound were a couple of tractor-trailers moving along at a steady clip. The headlights of a few cars and trucks traveling northbound did illuminate the other side of the road, while I was puttering to the next rest stop.

 
If I had wrecked, it would have been a while before someone came along and found me, then transported me to a hospital or driven to a phone and called for an