Duckpuddle Road: A Maine Story

T. Kenny James

Description

The days and months following the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in late 1963 was a catastrophic yet strangely formative time for young American adults. A group of such come together in a saltwater farmhouse on Maine's remote Duckpuddle Road. In the paleness, loss and tragedy, something is born. It is not a political awakening, but a deep-rooted and shared reaction to alienation and apprehension. Over time, it shapes their beings, rewiring hearts. It is not nominally Aquarian, but it is a personal bonding, a magnified closeness. What comes to be shared by the group is a deeper feeling for each other, not in a "cause", but in a new centred awareness allowing the opening of once-closed selves, a life reaffirmation that grows and proves to be durable... and infinitely transportable.

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 28 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528964494
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Duckpuddle Road: A Maine Story
James T. Kenny
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-06-28
Duckpuddle Road: A Maine Story About the Author About the Book Dedication Copyright Information Acknowledgement 1-Storm Guests 2- Swarovski Day? 3- What is Art, Anyway? 4-Mud, Mist and Even More 5-Fish and Foul 6-Men, Monsters and Full Moons 7-Life’s Lesions 8-Don’t Take Me Littoral 9-Land’s Very End
About the Author
James T. Kenny, Ph.D., is a retired Associate Professor of International Law and former Vice Chancellor for Research at Auburn University, Montgomery. He lives with his wife, Delia Trafford Kenny, while their three daughters live in Alabama, Virginia, and Manitoba, Canada, respectively. In his retirement, he continues to write in his academic discipline and in the production of fiction. He is the former Board Chair of the Teague Biotechnology Center, the Chinese Language and Culture Center of Maine and presently chairs the Confucius Classroom of Maine.
About the Book
The days and months following the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in late 1963 was a catastrophic yet strangely formative time for young American adults. A group of such come together in a saltwater farmhouse on Maine’s remote Duckpuddle Road. In the paleness, loss and tragedy, something is born. It is not a political awakening, but a deep-rooted and shared reaction to alienation and apprehension. Over time, it shapes their beings, rewiring hearts. It is not nominally Aquarian, but it is a personal bonding, a magnified closeness. What comes to be shared by the group is a deeper feeling for each other, not in a “cause”, but in a new centred awareness allowing the opening of once-closed selves, a life reaffirmation that grows and proves to be durable… and infinitely transportable.
Dedication
To my wife, Delia Trafford Kenny, whose patience and counsel sustain me in all that I do.
Copyright Information
Copyright © James T. Kenny (2019)
The right of James T. Kenny to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528925914 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528964494 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgements to my friends, now departed, whose very interesting lives and views are the substance of this work: Tom and Micki McCoy, Neil Ramsey, George and Lucille Curtis.


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"We do not remember days,
We remember moments."
Cesare Pavese
1-Storm Guests
I could smell the snow. “That’s how it works,” Sam Mitchell had once told me; the way you reckoned a storm’s approach. Sam was a Penobscot and knew these things. I inhaled the moisture, felt it too, when I headed out earlier to get some kindling. Drift started coming in about mid-morning. Guests from upcountry were due that afternoon.
That morning, me, Jim Sullivan, Sully’s what they all call me, was sitting in the downstairs bedroom. A few weeks back, Janet Nason, a visiting friend of certain gothic tendencies, had said that old-timers called the downstairs bedroom the ‘dying room’. I remembered that only because I had been thinking some about death. I looked at the big, oak-framed bed. My eyes wandered to the wooden floor with its wide planks and eight-inch baseboards. It was so old—this place. Outside, I could hear the strain of a trumpet wind.
Sam told me that he and his brother had once left their home island reserve for a trip upriver. Three or four hours out they saw a red fox moving restlessly on the bank. It was pacing, barking, really disturbed. The brothers glanced at each other nervously, and without a word turned their canoe around and headed back downstream. A relative had died. Sam told me things like that—talked slowly. He tried to teach me about animal voices and sacred places. I had known Sam for three years. I first met him on a gusty spring afternoon as I was fishing off a point on a bend in the big river named after his tribe. I turned to put on a new fly and there he was. Moved quietly for a big man. Sam introduced himself, and we talked some about early season brook trout as we angled the same stretch of water. We met there again, got to know and like each other.
After that, we spent a few hours discussing life and the nature of things. We talked easily as we fished sometimes continuing our chats over coffee at a little side street café in Old Town. Still, it was hard for me to understand some of what Sam said, especially when he went mystic as he sometimes did. I tried to think about him and the meaning of his words, looking out that big window on a long-ago, winter morning. I was sitting on an antique, a leather-ribbed overseas trunk. I was alone and relaxing. I didn’t often do that back then, at age twenty-four. I watched the snow fall. I watched it fill. Out front, it filled the right angle in a seam of frozen ground and stone fence. It covered the spaces between house and barn, barn and shed. It soon covered the kennel run. The dogs weren’t there. I knew they were in the kitchen. Bane and Miss Polly Pander, our two German Shepherds, had the good sense to ‘not go to the ground’ in bad weather. They were in a double doggy curl, living spoons, under the big oak table. The cats were somewhere, I guessed, in some other cozy spot. Real survivors those kitties were. Our farm kitchen radiated from the warmth of a large wood stove, a thing nice to be near, man or beast, when the great nor’easters came calling.
I watched the whitening of the stone fence. That bulwark, running to the road from the west side of the house, kept Malcolm Pierce’s cattle penned during the warmer months. Yes, warmth, it was a nice thought just then. The wall, built to keep cattle in, was now keeping snow out—out of the pasture, forcing it to pile up in the dooryard. A lot of snow to shovel, but I figured, nobody uses front doors in the winter. Let it stay there, heap up till April. When it melts, I’ll open the front entrance and take down the spruce wreath too, the one Ethan made, if it hasn’t blown away by then. The wind could be so brutal.
In the storm’s girth, I saw waves of snow drift across our un-surfaced lane—Duckpuddle Road. It didn’t all drift. A blizzard’s beauty is its breadth, its chaos, its restless urge to change. There were neat cyclonic swirls and, at times, heavy gusts with snow driving harder, more granular. Mostly, the fall just kept coming in on the wings of its host storm. With only a mile or so of woodlot between us and the ocean’s edge, the message was one of seasonal courtesy and courtship. We were being kissed by the wintry North Atlantic. Large windows iced. They shivered.
An early and severe winter, this 1963. Our friends, my wife, Becky’s friends really, were coming down from Aroostook, Maine’s northernmost county. It was a long tug. I hoped they’d be OK. True enough, though, December had been a bitch. It was now the week after Christmas, but I still remembered how frozen my feet got bringing in the tree a few weeks back. Ethan and I had cut it in the woods out behind the farm, a deceptively large balsam fir. It took the two of us and Becky to bring it in. We walked on bear paw snowshoes using ropes and halters to tote it back through the weald, over the stone fence and up the sloped, icy pasture behind the house. We cut about three feet off the top, Becky insisted on that and then anchored our trophy in a roofing tar barrel loaded with ballast bricks. Becky came up with a few tree baubles, but mostly we made the decorations. It was a humble totem.
A month earlier, we had set our letterbox in about the same way as our tree. Like most rural Mainers, we depended neither upon the good aim nor goodwill of county snow plow operators. Seeing not a few planted mailbox posts kicked flat by snow blades, we went with the conventional wisdom. The best thinking in our part of the country held that a box and its post should be a more migratory affair. To be really secure against the plough, the post had to be set by the side of the rural route in a potato barrel. This unlikely structure was stabilized with field stones tossed into the barrel around the post; the big stones were everywhere on saltwater farms such as ours. Such a rig, once knocked over, could be easily upended, put ‘right as rain’ before the carrier’s next visit.
The steady snowfall was hypnotic, a mantra whose rhythm slowed me down, set my thoughts adrift. Unfortunately, they didn’t drift too far, just back some weeks to late November. Everything since then had seemed so sad, so much like endings. I was still in a kind of shock, an emotional paralysis from the main event, our generation’s fall from grace. Then, we didn’t call it ‘the day the music died’. The wound was still too raw for such a flimsy poultice. It was, for me, for many of us, a hard extraction, a gaping, dry-socket of grief, the murder of the President, our President. “Kennedy’s been shot!” That’s what I first heard. On that clear fall day, I had been sitting by the dispatcher in the Sheriff’s Office in Rockland waiting for a deputy. I was a social worker back then, and part of my job was to assist law enforcement officials with the transportation of youngsters in the Court’s custody.
In moments, the deputy and I would be in a cruiser heading to Portland and Juvenile Detention with a recently senten