High Adventure at an Early Age
Unless you’re from Melrose (the author’s moniker for anyplace from away), Bait Barrel Kids and Other Maine Tales is an indispensable guide to the way life really should be. In this collection of first-person stories, Gary Anderson delivers tales of adventure and survival of a kid growing up in Harpswell, summering in Sebasco, and working as Search and Rescue warden all over the state.
The book recalls a simpler time when Adventure came from your own resourcefulness and whatever you could muster for a boat, gun, or vehicle. Infractions (those for which you got caught) were met with swift Discipline from the nearest available parent. In the wide swath he cut as a tough knee-ed kid, more than one “summer brat” was left spinning in place wondering, “Who was he? Where did he come from? Where did he go?”
Bait Barrel Kids derives from the author’s childhood playing and working with his brother and cousin on the wharves in his homeport of Cundy’s Harbor. To earn cash the young entrepreneurs teamed up and “took on jobs the menfolk dragged their feet on and became friends to nearly all the ladies in Cundy’s Harbor. Of course, in addition to generous pay, we were on the top of the list for pies, cookies, and cakes whenever they baked.”
Jobs included collecting glass milk bottles, cutting wild greens, digging clams and quahogs and stripping periwinkles, or wrinkles, “by the gallons” from the wharf pilings to sell to the Italian market in New York.
“Work” often led to adventure and misadventure, which is what makes each story such an outrageous and enjoyable romp. Barrel staves were fashioned into skis; whole barrels, loaded to the brim with fermented redfish, were employed as barriers for careening bikes and various contraptions headed down Holbrook Street towards the New Meadows River. The reader comes to marvel that anyone survived to recount these tales.
Anderson is a decorated veteran of both the Maine woods and coast. From the Grange Hall in Strong to the Fish House in Vinalhaven, the “gentle reader” is welcomed into the room. At the end, you’re left wishing you’d been there for the events as they happened. Life in the Good Old Days seems rosy – if not easy – before the advent of cell phones, road rage, or iPods.