ESTESBOG

by Peter Walker

My brother Tommy is about three years younger than me. We grew up in a rural township in the Appalachian foothills of southwestern Maine. Through grade school Tommy had a best friend, Leigh Flynt. He and Leigh were such close friends that they could communicate without saying anything. They’d just be standing there looking at each other and simultaneously burst out laughing and both know exactly what was so funny. It was spooky.

Leigh was a homely kid. He was short and wiry and jug-eared and wore thick glasses. But he still had a special talent. He learned to swallow enormous quantities of air, then release it back out in a controlled way so as to make some of the longest belches ever made. With the possible exception of his mother, long-suffering Joan Flynt, Leigh’s humungous burps quickly overcame a person’s revulsion index and reduced most people to uncontrollable fits of laughter.

Leigh’s dad, Bill, was a WW II fighter pilot who shot down three German aircraft before getting shot down himself and spending a period of time in a Nazi POW camp. Bill made his living as a civil engineer with a little farming on the side. The Flynt clan lived in a big frame farmhouse with attached barn at the top of Harris Hill.

There were five Flynt children: Mary, Leigh, Willie, Betsy, and a much younger son who surprised them all much later. Poor Joan always seemed to be about a day behind the rest of the world in her efforts to keep up with the chaos.

All the Flynts were skiers. Bill’s philosophy about skiing was about the same as his general approach to child rearing and life in general. Go fast and take chances. Every year at Sunday River Ski-way you could count on the Flynts to compete in the family race. Every year you could hear Bill up there screaming in vain at his wife and family to ski faster.

And every year they came in last.

Anyway, you are probably reading this because the title promised something else altogether.

Well, one summer day when Tommy and Leigh were about 9-years-old and the temperature and humidity were both about the same number – say, around 90 – the two were prowling out back of the Flynt’s barn when they rounded a corner and there lay a Holstein heifer dead as a stone. She lay almost on her back with her legs splayed out like four fence posts and her belly enormously swollen and taut like an over-inflated beach ball.

Tommy looked at the sight, then at his buddy Leigh. Leigh looked at the carcass, then made eye-contact with Tommy. Without so much as a word between them they broke into a charge toward the bloated bovine.

“Geronimo!” they yelled in unison and leaped as high as they could above the late Holstein’s belly. In 5.0 Olympic form they both tucked their legs so as to land knees-first, expecting to bounce off as if landing on a spherical trampoline. But instead the carcass seemed to split wide open allowing both of inside with a sickening “splut!”

A moment after that and two unspeakably gooeyed-up young humans emerged from the belly of the beast vomiting uncontrollably. Smeared with somewhat iridescent gore the two ran screaming for the house where Joan stopped them at the door and forced them back into the barn. There she turned the frigid garden hose on the two boys (ground water in Maine wells is usually about 47 degrees)  and made them strip and scrub and scrub some some more.

It was a day to remember – or forget – depending upon one’s point of view.

 The Flynt kids grew up following the fighter pilots’ creed. Mary dated only the fastest and most dangerous men in her high school. At last count she’d been widowed once (sky-diving accident) and divorced three times. The younger kids’ lives seem to have been less remarkable.

 Leigh and Tommy remained friends into high school. Tommy became a finesse skier, instructor, and Ski Patrolman. Leigh continued to ski flat out and most of the time barely in control – just the way Dad taught him.

One afternoon at Sunday River 17-year-old Tommy arrived at the base lodge to learn a fatality had occurred on another part of the mountain. When other Patrolmen brought the body down it was Leigh. He’d passed a “Danger – Trail Closed” sign at an incredible rate of speed and jumped off the top of one snow-covered rock into the side of another.

by Peter Walker

            In the 1970s the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife had need for a large float plane that could carry large loads of fish for stocking remote lakes as well as occasional heavy or bulky loads to road-less locations in the northern interior of the state. That need was satisfied by the long-term loan by the U.S. Army of a deHavilland Beaver from its reserve aircraft fleet.

            The Canadian-made Beaver is a single-engine, high winged “tail dragger” powered by a big 400 hp radial engine. ME IF&W fitted large floats to the 7-passenger flying truck and soon the distinctive oscillating rumble of its 9 cylinders could be heard from time to time as it lumbered from one lake to another on its various missions.

            The Beaver’s primary use was as a flying hatchery truck. With two large, bomb-shaped water tanks mounted on top of each pontoon, the Beaver could carry enough water to support 360 pounds of brook trout, landlocked Atlantic salmon, or lake trout (Mackinaw) per load. Generally loads that size were destined for large lakes. Therefore, on most of the Beaver’s stocking missions, the pilot could land and gently release the fish into the water rather than rudely “bomb” them into the lakes from the air.

            The ability to carry that much water aloft made the Beaver a fairly capable forest fire fighter as well. Maine Warden Service pilot Gary Dumond once responded to a Maine Forest Service request for help and managed to kill a small lightning-sparked fire with a single drop before it could progress beyond an acre or so.

            Maine IF&W maintains a hangar with float plane ramp in Greeneville at the southern tip of 42-mile-long Moosehead Lake in the northern interior of the state. One June day Chief Aircraft Mechanic Howard Lambertson, an assistant, and Pilot Gary Dumond were overhauling the engine on one of the department’s Cessna 185s when the distinctive drone of a radial engine began to grow in the distance.

The Warden Service Radio was wired to a speaker over the workbench. From it came the clear voice of Chief Pilot Dana Toothaker, who was at the controls of the Beaver. “Howard, something has come loose and is banging against the floats. I’m going to do a low fly-by. See if you can tell what it is.”

Pulses quickening, the three men grabbed binoculars and ran out onto the tarmac between the hangar and the lake. Damage to the rigging of the floats could make a landing dangerous.

To the north they could see the big yellow plane lumbering toward them and appearing larger and larger as it closed the distance.

With field glasses trained on the plane’s undercarriage, each man strained to spot some loose cable or strut. The engine noise grew loud as the airplane filled their lenses.

Closer and closer; louder and louder it came until it was right overhead. Then, in an instant, there was nothing but water in their fields of view!

Bloosh! The three were struck by 1,000 gallons of water released 300 feet overhead at a speed of 100 mph!

Now that is wet!

Gotcha!

Name a hit song that mentions Bangor, Maine. There are several.

EPISODE 2

In Colorado, as in most states, for safety’s sake it is illegal to possess a loaded gun (cartridge in the chamber) in a vehicle. It is also illegal to fire a weapon from a vehicle, whether on or off road and it is illegal to fire from or across a public road. Yet so many Colorado hunters, despite having to take mandatory hunter safety classes before they can buy a hunting license, somehow rationalize that the seconds that it will save them if a deer or a pheasant runs across the road in front of them justifies breaking those rules.

The ones I can’t figure out are the knot-heads that store their weapons in the bed of the pickup or the back of their SUV fully loaded. There is no advantage and often it places themselves or their passengers in great danger. I once wrote a ticket up in Sedgwick County to a goose hunter who was driving alone off road in a Suburban with a collection of long guns stacked inside the rear cargo door with barrels aiming right at his seat. The top one in the stack was an enormous 10 gauge shotgun fully loaded with giant shells that looked like small sticks of dynamite! What on earth was he thinking? The fine wasn’t very large. Unfortunately you can’t write someone a ticket for being stupid. Read more…

Episode 1.

Years ago officers from the Colorado Division of Wildlife organized a road check on Raton Pass on I-25 just before traffic passed on into New Mexico. Even though the main reason for a major check station is wildlife law enforcement (they always coincide with big game seasons), officers from many other agencies attend as well. A typical check station will have State Patrol, drug enforcement, U.S. Forest Service (illegally harvested Christmas trees), federal game wardens and even FBI agents in case someone with a federal warrant should be encountered.

On this particular day a new and very fancy Ford pickup with Texas plates came through the checkpoint with a nice mule deer buck lying in the bed. The driver was a big, good-natured fellow from Dallas in a big white cowboy hat.

He proudly showed them his Colorado Deer License that matched the tag attached to the deer carcass, then engaged several of the officers in some pleasant banter. Meanwhile an older Colorado officer took a closer look at the deer. When he lifted one hind leg it exposed the end of a Canada goose stuffed up inside the chest cavity. For those of you who are not familiar with hunting, waterfowl require a separate license and stamps issued by both the State and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

When a break came in the conversation up front, the game warden asked the Dallas hunter to come back to the back of the truck. Then the officer lifted the leg of the carcass wide to expose the goose and asked, “What’s that?”

Without skipping a beat the fellow feigned a look of total surprise, then grinned and boomed out, “Why that goose-eatin’ son-of-a-bitch!”

My e-friend and frequent commenter Ralph Romero from southern Colorado had a comment on the flying Oldsmobile story: “Great story. I had a 1976 Oldsmobile Omega Brougham. . .great car. However, it did NOT have the ability to fly! I tried it a few times! Why, yes, there was beer involved!”

In the 46+ years I have been (legally) driving, I have owned just about one of everything and two or three of a few. In fact, my very first automobile after I got my license in the fall of 1963 was a 1956 Olds 88 that my grandfather surrendered to me when he decided to give up driving. Along with it came about ten well worn tires which I managed to rotate around and keep it propped up on inflated wheels most days. That car must have weighed as much as today’s average bus. It contained a substantial amount of steel (one of my aunts suggested the frame was probably cast iron).

  Read more…

by Peter Walker

One thousand acre Wassookeag Lake lies just outside the little mill town of Dexter, Maine. From 1975 through 1977, Wassookeag was the most northerly of the more than 600 lakes on my watch as an Assistant Regional Fishery Biologist in Maine’s Fishery Region B, the south central coastal plain.

            Lying next to a minor population center in otherwise rural central Maine, Wassookeag received heavier ice fishing pressure than most lakes. The lake at that time possessed small populations of landlocked Atlantic salmon and lake trout (“Mackinaw”). There were never enough to go around, yet I could always find an assortment of several dozen “townies” trying their luck on Wassookeag.

Wassookeag was well inland and high enough in latitude to lie in a much colder climate than lakes along the coast. By late winter the ice might approach four feet in thickness. This was enough to support any vehicle safely. Read more…

by Peter Walker

Did you ever hear of a hound making a career change?

Years ago my friend Dave Schnoor, manager back then of the state fish hatchery out in Wray, had a little rabbit hound named Luke. Luke was “beagle-ish,” but by no means a purebred. He was tri-colored like a typical beagle and small in stature. But Luke was heavier set and his head, ears and feet suggested a basset somewhere in his recent ancestry.

At any rate, Luke’s true love, aside from being a Schnoor family member and all the duties that entailed, was hunting rabbits. With his super nose and full voice, he was very good at it.

When Luke was around 7 years old, the unthinkable happened. His humans, for reasons he couldn’t fathom, brought home a pair of Brittany puppies. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with competition. Life was cruel. Life was unfair. And it was about to turn more so. Read more…

 by Peter Walker

His name was Tiny. He belonged to the Tedfords who lived up the hill from my grandparents in rural southwestern Maine.

He was quite possibly the oddest little dog I’ll ever see. Physically he looked like a critter made of leftover parts and pieces. His head was pretty much golden retriever both in size and appearance. But his body was more or less basset hound. So his head was way too big for his body.

His legs were extremely short and his tail stood straight up. His hair was long and frilly – a mixture of yellows and whites. The upper half of his tail had long white hair trailing off like the big flag on a sailboat’s mast. Read more…

by Peter Walker

USFWS photo by Peter Johnson, 2008

Oh, why does man pursue the smelt?
It has no valuable pelt,
It boasts of no escutcheon royal,
It yields no ivory or oil,
Its life is dull, its death is tame,
a fish as humble as its name.
Yet – take this salmon somewhere else;
And bring me half a dozen smelts!

Ogden Nash, 1902-1971

            I can’t explain it either. But ever since I was a little kid I’ve had a fascination with the smelt. And lots of other Mainers do, too.

            Middle Range Pond, the natural lake at the foot of the hill where I grew up in Poland Spring, Maine had a thriving population of tiny, sardine-sized smelts. They lived in the lake’s depths and were only seen in the early spring around ice-out when they ran up the little tributary brooks late at night to spawn. Men used to stay out all night to go smelting. They would catch the tiny fish with fine mesh dip nets. The limit was 4 quarts per fisherman per night. But, as I soon came to realize, smelts for most Maine outdoorsmen, are simply an excuse to stay out all night and howl at the moon and drink themselves into oblivion.

Read more…