I never really knew my mother's parents--her mother died in 1956, long before I was born, and I only met her father (who died several years ago) once or twice, well into my own adulthood. When I was a kid, the phrase "my grandparents" meant exclusively my father's parents. They were the ones we visited, the ones I went to stay with.

I'm not as racked up about it right now as I might have expected to be, probably because dementia took away the man-as-I-knew-him some time ago and that part of the process has already happened. We've known for the last several days that this point would come soon--his condition took a sharp downturn last weekend. I went with my father to see him a couple of days ago, and that day was actually worse than today has been. To see a man like the one he used to be so horrifically diminished, unable to understand or escape, is... hard.

Well, now he has escaped. So better to think of him as he was.

Until I came along and messed up the curve, the men in my line have traditionally started their families early. When I was born, Gramp was only 43, Dad 21, which is how it happens that I didn't lose my last grandparent until a month after my 49th birthday. This means that in my earliest memories of him, my grandfather wasn't an old man; hell, he was younger than I am now. He and my grandmother ran a hunting lodge up in the tiny (now-deorganized) town of Oxbow Plantation, Maine, and he still had his day job teaching English at the high school over in Ashland. I have a clear memory of him walking into the kitchen at the lodge on a Friday afternoon, carrying his bookbag and still wearing his tie (schoolteachers wore ties in those days), delighted that Dad had taken the afternoon off and driven us up to spend the weekend.

When I got a little older, I started going up to Oxbow and staying for a while when school was out, and while I was thinking about this stuff after getting home from the nursing home Wednesday night, it occurred to me that basically every outdoorsy thing I ever did, I did with my grandfather. He was a woodsman in a time when that meant something, and when I was in Oxbow and the weather was decent, we did woods things. Low-impact woods things, since I was what passes for a city slicker in Maine, but woods things, all the same.

Generally those things involved a boat. We had a couple available, depending on what we wanted to do. For my 12th birthday, my parents and grandparents pooled together and bought me an Old Town Discovery canoe along with all the associated paraphernalia (paddles, flotation vest, and so forth), which we left in Oxbow most of the time. The Discovery was, and presumably still is, a great entry-level canoe--it's made of ABS plastic, so it's pretty much indestructible and literally unsinkable (since it still floats even if completely full of water), which makes it very forgiving of ineptitude, and when it came to boating at the age of 12, I had a lot of that.

We weren't into whitewater or anything particularly adventurous like that, anyway. We did our boating on the Aroostook River, which, in the vicinity of Oxbow, is frozen over in winter and extremely placid for most of the rest of the year. Apart from a few weeks after ice-out in the spring, it's slow, shallow, and not particularly wide. A person would have to go to some length to get into serious trouble on that part of the Aroostook in summer.

Generally what we would do was lash the Discovery to the roof of his pickup, throw the rest of the gear in the back, Gram would pack us a lunch and make sure we had enough fly dope, and we'd head to one of a couple of spots along the Aroostook as it passed through Oxbow. One was at a stretch called the Arbo Flats, out at what was then the end of the paved public part of the Oxbow Road (right before the gate to the private woods); the other was a few miles downstream from there at the Oxbow itself (a loop in the river from which the town takes its name). Or sometimes we'd pay the gate fee and go a ways upriver in the private woods to a very pretty deadwater off LaPomkeag Stream.

Sometimes we fished, but I don't eat fish or wish to do them harm, so I never really saw the sport in that. More often we would just sort of cruise and enjoy nature. Sometimes we got a little more nature than we bargained for, like the time we were passing close by what we thought was a large mossy rock until it lifted its antlered head out of the water and regarded us curiously. Near encounters with moose don't always end well, but this one evidently wasn't feeling particularly territorial. He went back to his river grass without comment.

Other, less momentarily terrifying sightings included muskrat, beaver, numerous birds (up to and including the rather impressive great blue heron, and some very pretty variants of dragonfly. Since we usually stopped on a gravel bar or small island somewhere along the way for lunch, we often saw a crayfish or three while we were at it (they like to hang out in the rocks along the shore).

If we could arrange for someone to move the truck so it was waiting for us at the other end, we'd do a one-way downstream trip (usually from the Flats down to the Bow); otherwise, we'd either paddle back or use a small outboard motor (which I still have, down in my basement, I've just realized) to get back up to where we'd put in.

Here we are with the Discovery at the Bow, either just about to leave or (more likely) being picked up after a cruise down from the Flats. The photo is undated, but it looks like I'm wearing my high school ring, so I'm going to guess it was the summer of 1987 or '88. The thing Gramp is holding is a pick pole, which is basically a pike with a blunt tip (the steel part is out of shot at the bottom)--often handier than a paddle when boating on a river as shallow and rocky as the Aroostook.

(Note that we had the same taste in slightly tragic shop-teacher glasses. Also, my eyebrows look like they were drawn on the photo with a Sharpie, what the hell was going on back then.)

On other trips, we had a more specific purpose, and for those we used different equipment. Gramp had a flat-bottomed aluminum boat of a type usually called a jon boat in these parts (or a skiff, but those are usually pointed at the front where jon boats have a square bow). People around here don't normally name boats smaller than pontoon party barges, but for reasons that now escape me, I named it Centurion. Sometimes we'd take that rather than the canoe, along with some nice wooden seats Gramp had built (because otherwise, in a jon boat you're just sitting on the metal ribs), a larger outboard, and a fuel can with a supply hose, and set off from the Bow to a place a mile or so downstream where there were some boom islands.

A boom island, for those of you not familiar with byegone timber harvesting practices, was a small artificial island built in a river to provide an anchor point for a log boom, which was a barrier that could be strung across a river to hold up logs being floated downstream. Booms weren't dams--they didn't impede the flow of the river, just halted large objects floating on the surface. River drivers used chains of them to control the progress of a drive. The logs would pile up behind the booms, and once enough of them were gathered, the drivers would then release the booms and let the logs proceed downriver to the next boom. This helped to keep them together and prevent them from scattering all over the place.

At our preferred spot on the Aroostook below Oxbow, there were four islands, each about 20 feet square, spanning the river at an angle from just off bank to just off the other. Because the practice of driving logs down the Aroostook had been outlawed in the 1970s, by the mid-to-late '80s when we were visiting them, the boom islands had been derelict for years, but the river drivers who built them never dismantled them. They were just left there, abandoned, with all the heavy iron chains and hooks that had made up the rigging for the booms just rusting in place.

So, two or three times a summer, when we felt like doing a little work along with our nature cruises, Gramp and I would load up Centurion and all the wangan, run down to the islands, and salvage some of the chains. He used to use some of them for the sorts of things a man who lived in the woods would use heavy iron chains for around the place, but most of them got donated to the Lumbermen's Museum over in Patten. I should go over there sometime and see if any are on display. Along with the chains, we occasionally found other, more interesting and esoteric items, like the hooks that linked the boom segments together, or the metal parts from lost or discarded lumbering tools (one of which, sandblasted and fitted with a new wooden shaft, proved to be a perfectly serviceable peavey).

Nowadays those expeditions might be viewed as vandalism of a heritage site, but at the time, they were just rotting away forgotten in the river, and gathering them up and taking them back to civilization seemed like the thing to do. At any rate, it was a pleasant way to pass the occasional afternoon and come back with more of a sense of accomplishment than when we'd just put the boat in the water and dub around.

Evenings, we used to get out the Maine Atlas and plan elaborate trips farther downriver that, in the way of these things, we never got around to doing. In theory, it's possible to follow the Aroostook all the way to its confluence with the Saint John in New Brunswick, but there are several dams that would have to be portaged around and it would have taken a few days, so we never found the time for it. We did have solid plans to go as far as Masardis once. I don't remember why we didn't. Probably it rained the day we were going to go, and then I was out of school vacation or something.

Another thing we always meant to do and never got around to was a trip to see the Eagle Lake and West Branch Railroad, which in those pre-Internet days was almost completely unknown outside Aroostook County. Strangely, this site has a connection to my other grandfather too, but that's a different story.

So, anyway. I've rambled long enough for one post. That was my grandfather. A man who could Make Things and Do Things. A man who could walk into a room full of strangers and be everyone's buddy by the time he left. A man who so loved the Maine woods that he could make even me love them too, at least as long as I was in them with him. Transported forward in time 35 years, he wouldn't have recognized the man I last visited on my birthday last year, much less the one I saw, gone in all but the strictest technical sense, on Wednesday.

If it had been up to him, I don't think he would have outlived my grandmother. He was lost without her. They were married 65 years, and within a year of her passing in October of 2015, his decline was starkly evident. He was such a strong and healthy man, even in his 80s, that it took seven years for Alzheimer's to finish him, but almost as soon as Gram was gone, the ending was never in doubt. I suppose it really isn't for any of us. Like the poet said, no one here gets out alive.

So long, Gramp. You didn't make an outdoorsman of me in the end, but that's because you were never really trying to change me; just to enjoy the time we had.

Leonard Wallace Hutchins, Jr.
March 23, 1930–July 22, 2022

--G.
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