By Joseph Monninger

Each spring around ice-out in Maine, my two friends and I go to a cabin beside the Kennebago River and spend a week casting to brookies.  We have been friends for forty-five years or more, back to Roosevelt Junior high in Westfield, New Jersey, back to Father Flannigan and the Tuesday afternoon CCD classes, back to Duke’s Italian subs on wide green paper dotted with oil and onions, back to Chris, and Birdie, and Joyce, and an eighth grade dance in Sue Pope’s basement when my friends went after the same girl, back to Coach Odie, and Mr. Gutek, the gym teacher, and back to wrestling matches and running golf carts on Echo Lake Country club, and first beers, Colt 45’s, and the smell of summer lawns, and girls out of the shower, and driving licenses and penny poker games in suburban rec rooms, and old friends, some now dead, and our parents and our hopes and dreams and absurdities.  Back to our youth, in other words.  Back to a land only three people on earth remember.

It is no use to try to divide the years and recall them separately.  They run together and tease out only after a few beers, and often our conversation loops back thirty years or more in the time it takes to change a fly. I am not even sure how so much time could have passed.  The years went by and seventh grade turned into high school, then high school turned into college, and then careers, and then families, and so on.  Now we are the guys who are a little stiff getting out of the cars when we arrive, the guys on the stream who know a thing or two about fishing, the guys who send each other web sites like: Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers.com.  And we do.  We do look like Kenny Rogers, gray and bearded and redder in the cheeks than we might like.  We are all a double haul from sixty.

*

If time travel is possible, then its portal is Cabin #1 on the Kennebago River, owned and operated by Reggie Hammond, Maine Guide and basketball fan, a busy sort of man with a gun on his hip and a laconic down-east accent that quavers to full flavor when the plumbing goes soft in any of his three cabins.  He is possessed by his plumbing, and because we are usually the first visitors in the spring, it is a fixture of our time at the camp to have Reggie swing by and curse his pex piping and his submersible pumps, the white whale of his business operation.

Reggie’s visit, of course, is an essential element of our time on the Kennebago, because by now our week together has the cadence of a mass, with all the attendant ritual and superstition.  I usually arrive first and set up camp in the cabin, lug in groceries, and try to get on the stream to catch the first fish for bragging rights.  Then Bob, a salesman and father of two, arrives.  He is a dedicated weight lifter and jogger, so he will have to go for a run to get the kinks out of his system.  Finally Ted will show up, always late, always dragging some odd food item out of his car, his first beer open two steps away from his vehicle.  He is a dad of three, a husband of thirty years and more, and a research biologist at the University of Connecticut.  He is also the noise in us.  He will begin gabbing, laying odds about fish catching, criticizing the food, critiquing our fly patterns, and generally causing a ruckus until we can get him on the stream and quiet him down.  He looks like a cross between Jed Clampett and Jeff Bridges playing the Dude.

The routine of our inaugural fishing foray each year is fixed and immutable: for decades we have spent the first night on the northern end of the Little Kennebago, a fly fishing only section of this gorgeous lake in a remote section of Maine.  We found this section of water when Reggie put us on it after we had miserable luck in the river one week.  Rain, even snow, had dotted the weekdays, and we felt fairly blue and foolish that we had come all this way to catch almost nothing.

“Try it out,” our Maine Guide said.  “You never know.  You might have some luck.  Lot of trout in that lake.”

We went.  Wind piggybacking rain blew at us, making it hard to cast.  Bob, the business-man jogger, a practical, laconic Mainer himself, said, “That’s a fair wind.  Give a frog a ride if it jumps too high.”

We kept at it, though.  And in time the wind calmed, as it always does at sunset, and we began hooking fish.  They weren’t large, but they were eager.  We stood three abreast casting to fish, happy to nab a strike from in front of someone else, each of claiming the largest fish, the most elegant cast.  In the course of the night the Little Kenny had become our common benchmark, our home field, a vernal pool that we returned to over and over again.  I stood shoulder to shoulder with these good friends, happy in a way that is different from the rest of the year.  These men represented my past, and I theirs, and often I began smiling before they reached the point of their stories, pleased to hear an old tale of woe trotted out and examined once more.  Thirty years of humor lingered behind most of the tales, and none us could say for certain what remained fact and what fiction.

We have seen some wonderful things on the rivers and lakes.  One year an osprey hunted nearly overhead, dropping out of the air like a feathered stone to carry a trout off in its talons.  A moose once ran the length of the lake, knee deep, its horny head turned to glance at us now and then.  We’ve seen good black snakes, and coyotes, but the creatures provide a sidelight to the trip.  We come primarily to visit with each other.

In the evenings, at dusk, we return to the cabin.  The designated cook begins food preparation, while the other two sit beside the woodstove and kibitz.  The food is rarely fussy, but it is nourishing and hot, and we eat it without complaint.  Afterward the woodstove draws us closer and we talk until sleep catches up with us.

Whatever the media tells us about men’s inability to communicate is repudiated by my trips to the Kennebago.  Each of us is a story to the other, and we tell and retell the elements of our lives.  I know when Bob or Ted’s children have done well, or suffered a failing, and I know what the hopes of their dads’ had been.  Often we talk about the mystery of the past, what it meant, how it shaped us.  To forget one’s past is a form of suicide, the saying goes, and we know we will not forget the past as long as we make it to the lake in the spring.

Some years back my wife cut up a small board, wrote down various aspects of a good fishing trip – most fish, biggest fish, camp esprit – and placed paper arrows in front of them so that we could line up the names with the accomplishment.  It is the perfect ductwork for our hot air, and the night before we break camp we hand out the trophy.  Ted has never won it; while Bob and I live, he will never win it, because it is far more entertaining to hear him rail about injustice, conspiracy, and the lifelong burden he has endured by fishing beside us.  On the last morning we clean the camp, wrap up the unspent groceries, then head back to our homes.  We never fish that last morning.  After a few days together we are ready to get out, put things to order, organize again.  But we drive in a caravan down the dirt road that connects us to the pavement and then back to the Maine highways.  We stop and get breakfast  — some lost wager has invariably forced one of us to pick up the tab – and talk about what the rest of the year holds.  Bob promises to make the camp reservations for roughly the same time the following year.  Then we talk about a seventh grade dance, a play on a football field, a time we hitch hiked to the beach and slept underneath a rowboat.

I drive home through the prettiest season in New England.  Window cracked, heat low.  Usually the fields have turned green by this time, and the stonewalls appear welcoming to the long waking of frogs and snakes.  I often smile on the way, shake my head.  For nearly forty years we have been saying goodbye and then returning.  We have the pictures to prove it.  But in my mind’s eye I see Bob and Ted, boys still, holding the red dotted brookies in the gentle cradles of their hands.  And all the trout slip from their fingers, and the wind catches their hair and pushes it back, dark hair, young hair, my friends’ hair.

“It won’t be any good until seven o’clock,” Ted says.  “I’m telling you now, I’ve told you for forty years, and I’ll tell you next year.  The fishing isn’t any good until right before nightfall.”

“The hour of the pearl,” I say, stealing a line from Steinbeck to describe that moment when the wind stops and the water flattens.

“The hour of the pearl,” Harv says.

The first night we will go to the southern end of the Little Kennebago, a fly fishing only section of a gorgeous lake in a remote section of Maine.  We found this section of water when the landlord of our cabin, a Maine Guide, put us on it after we had miserable luck in the river one week.  Rain, even snow, had dotted the weekdays, and we felt fairly blue and foolish that we had come all this way to catch, well, almost nothing.

“Try it out,” our Maine Guide said.  “You never know.  You might have some luck.  Lot of trout in that lake.”

I hope he’s right.  Listening to him, I tried to remember a movie that made me that excited but couldn’t come up with one.  Then I remembered the Exorcist.  I was in college in Philadelphia when it premiered, and I went with a buddy to the first showing.  I had no special feeling for the Exorcist beforehand….at least not in the sense my student had with his long standing love of comics.  But I had read the novel and liked it, and the publicity surrounding the release was remarkable.  I couldn’t escape the buzz.

So we went.  We stood in a line that went around the block.  By the time we got in and squeezed into two seats near the front of the theater, the movie had already started.  Cue strange piano music and shots of Georgetown.  Well, you know the rest.  The movie jolted me — and most of the crowd — out of my seat several times.  It touched all the important elements of the novel and had my heart pumping.  It was fun, real fun, to watch a movie in a  new release with a crowd of enthusiastic fans.  By the time it ended everyone was wrung out.  We went to a bar and had a beer, then headed back to our dormitory.

As Americans, we love movies.  Maybe everyone in the world does, but the opening of a big popcorn event is terrific.  When Star Wars came out in re-release I took my son.  He was very young and when the music came on and the starship came into view….do you remember how incredibly big it looked? — he slowly climbed onto my lap but still kept his eyes on the screen.  He threw up eventually, mostly from nerves, then finally settled into the drama unfolding.

So, here’s hoping for a great premiere for the Avenger movie.  I’ll get around to seeing it, though I won’t get there this weekend.  I like thinking about my student going to see the movie and excitement he’ll feel.  I hope it meets his expectations.  I hope he has money for popcorn and a big drink.  And I hope the everyday goes away for a little while and that he lives in the world created on the screen, happy to watch, making a memory he doesn’t even understand right now.

That seems an apt description.  I’m closing in on 100,000 words on a novel I’m calling Collie’s War.  It’s set in WWII and it follows the fates of a circle of characters as they go through it.  I have a central love story to follow, but the rest —and I still have another 50,000 words to go — is scenery on the side of the road that I sense, but can’t know.  Nevertheless, there is pleasure in composition.  I like going out to my cabin and seeing what’s going to happen next.  The trick is not to overrun the headlights or expect your vision to be too clear.  A lot of writing is trust.  If you’re lucky, and if you’ve done the work to train yourself, then you can usually hope for a good outcome.

So that’s what I’m thinking about this morning as I cross the 100,000 word mark.  We’ll see where the light shines and I’ll try to follow along behind.

This is what I say the first day of class every year I’ve taught: Lateness is a choice.

Students hate hearing that.  At first they shoot bewildered looks around the room, checking to verify that they heard me correctly, then they start shaking their heads.  Lateness a choice?  They have never heard something so ridiculous.  Some look down and scribble in their notebooks.  What kind of nut do they have for a professor?

After I let it sink in for a moment, I lay it out.

I ask: If I had a million dollars to give you, but you had to be on time, do you think you would be punctual to class?

If your life depended on being here, would you allow yourself enough time to wash, dress, breakfast?

But, they ask, what about unanticipated things?   Accidents?  Cars that won’t start?  Snowy driving conditions?

Sure, I say.  But those things, fortunately, happen only once or twice a year.  The genuine root of tardiness, as we used to call it in my school days, is a neat little piece of psychobabble called passive-aggressive behavior.

They like that even less.

Passive-aggressive behavior, in case your Psych 101 is a few years behind you, is a deft trick used by all sorts of people, but perhaps by no one better than, say, an old relative.  The classic example is the elderly mom who says: Son (or daughter), you take the light bulb, I’ll be fine sitting here in the darkness.  Go ahead.  Have a good time.  At my stage of life, I don’t need light on a Saturday night.

Tardiness, or chronic lateness, is wonderfully aggressive in the most sneaky sort of way.  Want to meet for a movie?  Say at 9 o’clock?  Well, if I show up at 9:10 I’ve screwed up the plans for the night, made you late as well, and I can shrug my shoulders and pretend that the lateness demons surrounded me and made punctual arrival impossible.  It wasn’t my fault.  Things happen.  Or, as my students say, Whatever.

But what I really said by being late was: I have little consideration from what you wanted in this situation, so I showed up when I liked, claiming our shared time for my own uses, while you, you groundling, had to wait like a leashed puppy outside a coffee shop.

When a student walks into class late, what’s the message she or he is sending?  What is he or she telling me and the other pupils?

Dude, I’m sorry if you started class, but I had to get some coffee.  Start again.  It may take me a few minutes to find my seat and get my book open, but you understand.  I couldn’t help it.  Dude, sorry, maybe those other students had already gotten into the mood a little for this class, but I’m more important than that, so, Dude, let me just get my Sharpie out.

Of course, tardiness is not restricted to students.  My wife and I have a friend who is habitually late.  We routinely add as much as an hour onto any schedule we try to keep with her.  If we plan to meet her, or to pick up her kids, we deliberately tell her to be ready an hour beforehand.  When she is invited to dinner, we try to cook things that can be heated up quickly and require no lengthy preparation.  The irony, naturally, is that she is consistently on time.  But it’s her time.  Even her kids roll their eyes when she makes a plan.  They know.  Everything in her world is an hour or more behind everyone else.

As for me, I am on time, primarily, I suppose, because I’m a bit of a punctuality nut.  But I also have never understood the point of being late to things.  Why bother setting a time at all if you can show up when you like?  One of my dearest friends, a fellow I grew up with, is as dependable on this count as a clock.  If he said he would meet me on the top of Mount Washington at midnight on July 17^th, I could set my watch by him.  He would be there not five minutes late, not one minute late, but early or on the exact stroke of twelve.  It may sound silly, but it’s one of the things I’ve always considered a tribute to our long-standing friendship.  Neither one of us would disrespect the other by failing to make every effort to arrive on time.  I would not for an instant consider making him wait for me.  Rather, I dedicate myself to making sure I meet him on the square.  If someone has to manage time, it should be at the front of the bargain, not afterward.  That’s fair.  That’s non-aggressive.

My position has brought me flak when I announce it in class, but I don’t care.  I’ve always felt I am doing young adults no service by allowing them to wander into class whenever they manage to make it.  It’s not fair to the ones who shake their tails in the morning and get moving.  And it’s not, in the final analysis, fair to the tardy student.  She or he had better learn to arrive on time.  A boss is going to be less understanding than a crusty old professor who has slogged into a talk about expatriates in Paris.

A time or two I have locked the door.  The students arrive, frequently with a warm coffee in hand, and scratch.  I ignore them.  The rest of the class giggles.  One or two brave students came to see me afterward to protest.  Their money, they said.  Their classes.  If they wanted to come in with five minutes left, that’s was their business.

I grin.  And then I get to indulge in one of the great pleasures of growing older.  I harrumph.  You just can’t harrumph when you’re younger, but it because a useful tool as you turn gray.  I am paid, I said, to manage a class.  I can’t manage a class by letting people wander in whenever they like.  Harrumph. Double harrumph.

No student has ever arrived late more than once.  When all is said and done, it’s as important a lesson plan as any I am likely to make

Reading about life on the prairie....

It’s thrilling to see an unusual bird. Who is not excited about the chance to see a snowy owl or an American oystercatcher in Maine? Yet there is the potential to experience wonder in watching our common birds.

My case in point today is the American crow. Here in Waterville, we are treated to an amazing spectacle late each afternoon. Hundreds of crows fly in from all directions to converge on a patch of forest behind the shopping center at Elm City Plaza in the fading daylight. The river of crows seems endless. No doubt, you have seen such behavior in your neck of the woods as well.

Why do the crows congregate to spend the night together? We don’t have a definitive answer, but some intriguing suggestions have been proposed.

Aside from humans with guns, the major threat to American crows is predation by great horned owls. Perhaps you have seen American crows mob a roosting great horned owl during the day. The crows are brutal, swooping down on the owl and pecking it. Usually the owl is forced to fly to find a more peaceful place to sleep.

Roosting might therefore offer protection from owl predation. It is awfully hard for an owl to approach when 1,000 or more crows are keeping a vigilant watch.

Another possible explanation comes from a somewhat controversial idea called the information-exchange hypothesis. The premise is that crows can learn about good food sources from each other. We have to be careful to avoid ascribing a human perspective to this information sharing. In the natural world, behavior that looks altruistic turns out to be selfish. In nature, individuals that watch out for themselves and their kin fare better than altruists. How does helping unrelated individuals survive increase the chance of getting your genes into future generations?

Honeybees, through their remarkable waggle dance, let other members of a hive know where good nectar sources are. But all individuals in the colony are related to each other, so sharing information indirectly benefits all colony members.

A roost of crows consists mostly of unrelated individuals. Crows are not so kind-hearted as to somehow share the location of a food bounty with unrelated individuals. However, it may be possible for crows to discover the whereabouts of good food. Crows may be able to assess the nutritional status of a crow as it comes back to the roost. Perhaps it is full of energy. If so, a crow in need of a good meal may follow the well-fed crow in the morning. This behavior can be seen as a type of parasitism. The definitive study to test for this type of information sharing in crowshas yet to be done.

One other explanation for crow roosts is the patch-sitting hypothesis. This explanation entails roosting near a site where there is a reliable source of food. The food does not need to be the most nutritious, but will provide roostingcrows with a breakfast to get them going in the morning in search of more substantial food and a snack in the evening before they go to sleep. Like the information-center hypothesis, this hypothesis needs more study as well.

Crow roosts are seasonal, occurring in the fall and winter. Some of these aggregations must be truly spectacular. I know of one report from Oklahoma of 2 million crows in a single roost! Roosts from 100 birds to tens of thousands are much more common.

We are seeing a trend of American crow roosts occurring in urban environments rather than in more rural or undeveloped habitats. Some have speculated the crows are taking advantage of the slightly warmer temperatures found in cities. Just a few degrees of warmth can make a big difference. Plus, the lights of a city make it easier to see great horned owls at night.

Herb Wilson teaches ornithology and other biology courses at Colby College. He welcomes reader comments and questions at whwilson@colby.eduimgres

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/26/melissa-harris-perry-the-help_n_1302275.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/24/ernest-hemingway_n_1297577.html

Here are a few blurbs about his work.  Take a look.  I’m enjoying Key to Suite immensely.  It’s such a treat to come across one of his novels….and that’s one of the best things you can say about a writer who is no longer alive.

JOHN D. MACDONALD  “….the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”

–STEPHEN KING

“….a master storyteller, a masterful suspense writer.”

–MARY HIGGINS CLARK

“….a dominant influence on writers crafting the continuing series character.”

–SUE GRAFTON

“….my favorite novelist of all time.”

–DEAN KOONTZ

“…the consummate pro, a master storyteller and witty observer.”

–JONATHAN KELLERMAN

“…remains one of my idols.”

–DONALD WESTLAKE

THE TRAVIS McGEE SERIES

“…one of the great sagas in American fiction.”

–ROBERT B. PARKER

“…what a joy that these timeless and treasured novels are available again.”

–ED McBAIN