My Uncle Finley Surrounded By Family and Friends

I took this photo in the spring of 1969 to show my family and friends down here in Dundalk, Maryland what it was like up there at Katahdin Lodge of Patten, Maine on a typical Sunday afternoon.

Whewee! I luv the sculpted lines of that "Trumpet"—that'd be Triumph 650 Motorcycle to you non-motorcyclists.

That gray clad country gentleman leaning in the doorway is Morris, and the smiling woman on the back of the Triumph 650 Motorcycle is his good wife Marge. Morris and Marge were very close friends to my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha, and the two couples often spent time together.

Morris and Marge, Fin and Marty, and I were all in the Lodge's dining room playing Cribbage and sharing great conversation, when Gary and Cathy Glidden pulled into the dooryard on their motorcycle. They were just stopping by for a quick visit. Gary and Cathy worked at the Lodge during hunting season—Gary as a hunting and fishing guide and Cathy on the housekeeping staff. They wanted to know when they should start working at the Lodge for that upcoming bear hunting season.

That is Cathy back there in the helmet, of coarse, and you can just see Marty's right shoulder there on the other side of Gary.

One of my nephews saw this photo and thought that Fin looked like he was angry at Gary, but it is just a tad bit of a serious talk going on between them there for a minute or two. They were fairly well matched as working partners and had tracked many a wounded bear or deer through the woods together, often at night, and had shown plenty of paying sportsmen good, safe, successful, memorable times in the vast Maine woods.

The TV reception at the Lodge was limited to about two and a half stations. One was always from over in Woodstock, Canada. And the weather had first say on which ones we could tune in to at any time.

No matter. Listening to Fin, Marty and our Mainer friends, like Morris and Marge, tell stories, some true some not so at all, was far better entertainment than TV any day of the week.

I was setting at the Lodge's Cribbage Board and Yahtzee Game adorned dining room table, one friend filled Sunday, when I was hit with an epiphany of life affirming solidation. This was after having to hold onto to the table and my chair at least once or twice to keep from sliding off onto the floor into a puddle of pained, side-splitting, laughter. I had managed to keep it under control though, because it was 35 to 40 miles to the nearest hospital. And not one doctor in between. Can't be bustin' a gut due to overwhelming hilarity way up there in the woods like that.

The epiphany was: Listening to tall tales told well is no more like being an audience member at the Liars Club Yearly Awards Banquet than watching comedy shows on television is.

You are not supposed to "believe anything you hear and only half of what you see" (Joe Stanboni my Dundalk neighbor taught me that back in '66), which truly applies to TV, and telling tall tales, if anything.

I realized on that Cribbage and Yahtzee game playing, tall tale telling Sunday evening in Maine, that tall tales are a direct ancestor of most movies and television shows.

I thoroughly enjoyed my Sundays spent amongst those finest kind of country folk.

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I Bought A New 1969 Triumph 250 Motorcycle In Maine

My 1969 Triumph 250 Motorcycle

I had to drive 66 miles from Katahdin Lodge to the nearest Triumph dealer to buy that bike. There was a Honda dealer over in Houlton, 35 miles away, but the next nearest motorcycle dealer at all was up around Caribou and Presque Isle. And I checked the odometer once, it was 66 road miles from the Lodge to the Triumph dealer.

My Uncle Finley was going to buy himself one just like it, but the Triumph dealer would not give Fin a discount for buying two at a time. The dealer charged $735.25 for one, and he wanted $735.25 for the second one. But he was a native Mainer, who had never seen us before that day, and we were "from the outside", not from Maine. My Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha had moved to Maine, from Maryland, in 1965. The dealer may have given some native Mainer a break on the price, at least the 25 cents, but not to anyone from the outside.

I had some great times riding that motorcycle in Maine. It wasn't powerful enough to take the hills up there very fast, but that was O.K. with me, because I hadn't become too highly skilled of a rider yet.

In 1973, while living in Dundalk, Md., I bought a Yamaha 650 motorcycle. I became quite the highly skilled rider on that one, for sure; and there are still a few witnesses around who can testify to that fact.

Whenever I went riding out in the countryside, of Baltimore and Harford Counties in Maryland, with some other motorcycle riders from the Dundalk area, I always ended up leading the way. What I had learned up in Maine about country driving served me well when riding motorcycles through the Maryland countryside.

In Dundalk, I was nicknamed "Trick Rider", by a guy who I grew up with. He gave me that nickname because I would stand up on the seat, while riding, or hang off the side of my 650 Yamaha like a Plains Indian Warrior hanging off the side of a well trained horse while shooting from underneath the horse at battling Calvary soldiers or circled, covered wagons, and I'd do some other crazy looking things on the 650.

But my motorcycle trick-riding wasn't much of anything compared to what we see in motocross riding today. They really pull off some wild tricks in motocross, and usually way, way up in the air too.

In my defense though, we 1970s riders didn't have the super suspensions on our bikes like today's bikes have. And, like guitar playing, nobody had invented the wild, well tuned, modern licks or motorcycle tricks yet--that we enjoy today.

One time, up in Maine, I was on that 250 Triumph and goin' down the road feelin' fine, when I hit a huge mass of flying insects, just past Peavey's Corner on the way to Shin Pond from Patten. The massive cloud of bugs was so thick that they were peppering my face like bird shot from a shotgun blast and were flying up under my sunglasses and blinding me. So I had to turn around and head back to town.

I can't remember if they were mosquitoes or blackflies. Each of those insect species thrives in Maine every summer.

Maine's seasonal insect infestation gets so bad that you cannot walk very far outside before you are in bug bitten misery. You have to wear insect repellent when outside for more than a minute, if you want to be comfortable out there.

During summer bug season, we Katahdin Lodge bear hunting guides wore long sleeve shirts with the sleeves buttoned down at the wrists, and insect repellent applied to our wrists and lower forearms. We "bloused" our work boots military style. That means we tucked the bottoms of our pants legs up under big rubber bands, which held the doubled over pants cuffs tightly against our boot tops, to keep biting insects from crawling up our lower legs and chewing on them for a good, bloody meal. And we doused the sweatbands of our hats with bug dope too.

We guides all often got bit a few times each day. After all, somebody's gotta' feed them aggravating little dive bombers. The well fed insects then go on to be food for fish, birds and some larger insects, and those critters are all important parts of the local ecosystem. The bugs bite us humans, trout eat bugs and humans eat trout, at least I do.

Seems fair to me.

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A Guide To My Short Stories About Living In Northern Maine

Here is a guide to my short stories about being a Maine bear hunting guide and country girl's delight, up in Patten, Maine at Katahdin Lodge and Camps. I will provide links to each of these stories, where they are published on a Maine web site. Some stories are on several web sites.

Just keep in mind that I need a little bit of professional editing help. I also need to do some other 'sprucing up' of the stories, in order for me to be completely satisfied with these written works.

But the stories sure are interesting, entertaining, a tad bit educational, they contain some cool history and are (according to thousands of readers so far) easy and enjoyable to read.

I hope that you enjoy reading one or all of them.

The House Fire is a nice, but scary one (it scared me when it happened, that's for certain). This story is good reading for gentle and not so gentle folks of all ages.

The Day I Fell In Love With Patten Maine ain't nuthin' like you will expect, and it could be a mind blower. It's a real, small town, soap opera scene and a teenagers' thrill a second experience.

An Italian Nice Guy is a good bear hunting story that is really a chipmunk story. It is actually good for kids to read. No bears are even shot at in it. It is fictionalized a bit, but mostly true. I expanded on what I knew about Tony and his family, but they had to be real nice people.

Here also are copies of emails exchanged between myself and the Italian Nice Guy's family, confirming that I wrote his story well.

The Rocket Scientist is a crazy trip about a genuine Washington, DC Rocket Scientist. It is about one of a hunting guide's worst fears and dangers.

Jungle Dirt is something which stands on its own. It was my first attempt at fictionalizing a true story. It is about a Vietnam Veteran's experience, when he went bear hunting in Maine just three days after coming home from fighting hard for a full year 'Nam. It is a good story for all of us Vietnam Era Veterans and others who care about us, and how we were treated in America during and after the Vietnam War. Just about the only fictional parts have to do with the me making some descriptive guesses about the Nam Vet's mother and a small amount was expanded on to the guy's stepfather's description. Boss Hog on the Dukes of Hazard did look exactly like that friggin' jackass of a stepfather though.

Easiest Way To Carry A Dead Bear or My Uncle Finley Couldn't Handle It is a nutty piece, but it does give a darn good hunting tip. It gets right loony, ain't no doubt about it.

Bananastien is about young adults testing the limits in 1969 Patten, ME. Part of it gets real wild on those wild and woolly Maine country roads, when there is a true life high speed police chase.

Driving Northern Mainer Style is a basic "how to guide" on driving on those wild and woolly, climbin' and droppin', twisty and hard turning country and backwoods roads up there in Maine. And also how not to drive them roads. Within that written piece, there is also a story about how I nearly 'bought the farm' early one morning up on the Washburn Road, where it goes into the small city of Caribou, Maine. Ya' better tighten up y'ur seat belts for this one.

My VW Bug Trip To Maine has a hilarious bear hunting scene in it,. It's a hoot! And the rest of it is a wild, funny and very, very happy story. It was about a trip of mine back up to Maine, while I was on leave from the Army, just after I had graduated from US Army Photographic Laboratory Technician School, and before I was assigned to overseas duty on Okinawa. This story goes from Patten, ME down to Dundalk, MD and through a bunch of quite memorable experiences.

Then They Own You takes place in 1979, when I tried to work for my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley Clarke in Maine one more time. This one comes down heavy (in a bad way), as the Hippies used to say.


See this website as a book, viewing it a page at a time. Turn the pages by clicking on that OLDER POST button below. 

Click on HOME under this to go to the first page.

There is a table of contents over in the right hand column at the bottom of every page - under BLOG ARCHIVE.