Now that season has turned, yet again, ever so slowly, toward island summer, it is worth asking ourselves why so many people who are part of the great Maine Diaspora yearn to return to the state of Maine, if only for a few weeks a year.
The answers go well beyond Vacationland. The real reasons are, of course, legion-iconic rural villages, great scenic beauty, proximity to wildlife and nature and compelling communities inhabited by vivid local characters-to mention a few. But undeniably another immensely powerful draw is that Maine is still a place where skilled community members and elders mentor young people looking for meaningful work experiences that can shape young characters and values.
I was reminded of the powerful force mentors exert on impressionable minds when I recently returned to my forestry school for a memorial service honoring a great professor, David M. Smith, who was my first and most valuable mentor.
Dave Smith wrote the textbook that most foresters still use-The Practice of Silviculture-that was, and is, a wonderfully rich combination of ecological detail and practical approaches to understanding how forests change over time and how foresters can nudge Mother Nature-within certain limits-to produce the products and services societies depend upon.
But beyond that Dave Smith was a real person, and a real New Englander.
I remember that I used to eat pie with Dave Smith for breakfast in a logging camp in Eastern Maine and came to think of him as the embodiment of the quintessential Yankee-not in the sense of his baseball loyalties, but with respect to his bedrock values that infused his teaching, his mentoring, language, diction and his incredibly sly sense of humor.
Dave’ dry humor was as legendary as the proverbial drying of paint-if you didn’t listen carefully, you might not hear it all.
I recently dug out the notebook I kept from Smith’s silviculture (the art and science of growing forest crops) lectures during the spring of 1975. Amid the drawings of stratified forest stand structure, I kept notes in the margins on his use of language. Some of his commentary was about the forestry profession itself: Foresters needed to have “well-oiled necks,” he would remind us, in order to keep checking tree canopies for their live crown ratios. The East, he despaired, is “weevil heaven,” which is why we have so many “cabbage-headed white pines.” He grumbled about how much “printer’s ink was spilled” over certain forestry issues such as the use of herbicides, which is a “collection of swords that cut both ways.”
But most of his wisdom could be applied to life itself. Dave distrusted dogmatic presentation of ideas; he objected to the “magnificence of hindsight” among those who would “whoop it up” over some supposed new insight. He wanted us to keep our minds open and flexible – in his words to “keep several different strings to our bow,” and “to cook up new strategies” lest we “blunt our pick” on stubborn facts and “get blown from hell to breakfast.” He was careful about over-generalizing lest we fall into the habit of “racing the engine pretty hard,” by trying to “cover too much waterfront” and end up “being disappointed in love.” He wanted us to ground our ideas in the field so that we wouldn’t “exceed the speed limit in the arm chair,” or worse, “write the Lord’s prayer on the head of a pin.” Overly bookish people in Dave’s mind were apt to “chew the corners of their typewriter.” Dave avoided abstruse mathematical analyses, which were like trying to figure “which shell the pea went under last” and observed that, “figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.”
Fuzzy-headed thinking, on the other hand, would be equally dismissed as “flapping around in the breeze.” Knowledge was to be put into action, otherwise we were just “throwing dead cats” at a problem-allowing “our forgettery to outrun our memory,” or risk having the “whole thing disappear down an Orwellian memory hole.”
When Dave and I worked together in Maine at the Baskahegan Company, he counseled me not to get discouraged when an important silvicultural idea was rejected out of hand because it would never be adopted in Maine. Dave let me know that he had been told this many times by Maine foresters over the years; the first time he was told one of his ideas would never be accepted in Maine, it took 10 years to take hold. The second time something he advocated that would never happen in Maine happened in five years. From this Dave concluded: “In Maine on average, never takes seven years.”
I cannot count the number of times I have quoted Dave Smith, the quintessential New England Yankee, on this famously accurate observation.
Speaking of which, I would like to remind all of us of Dave’s famous definition of a Yankee-which could be modified slightly to fit any New England audience: “To the rest of the world, a Yankee is an American, to an American, a Yankee is a Northerner; to a Northerner, a Yankee is a New Englander, to a New Englander a Yankee is a Downeaster, to a Downeaster, a Yankee is someone who eats pie for breakfast.
I still eat pie for breakfast every chance I get.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.