Fittin’ In With The Locals Wasn’t Easy

If at least the past two, no, three generations of your family hadn’t been born and raised within oh, say sixty miles of the town of Patten, then you would always be “from the outside.” I respected that. They had a tough life up there livin’ in the woods. When there were local jobs available, the work was usually fairly hard and definitely dangerous. If they became injured or ill, it was their family, friend, or neighbor who drove them the hour or more it might take to get to the nearest hospital. Those folks up there relied on one another for their survival. Everybody looked out for each other.

The kids from Patten and the other small towns in the area would often go to each other’s dances and parties. And I went to most of them too, often with my best friend Gary McCarthy--we picked up some sweet babes together.

Early one relaxed, mid-summer's Saturday evening, just before the night's teen fun and country kid style action was about to commence ta' happening in Northern Maine, Gary and I were sitting and sipping sodas on swivel stools at the lunch counter in the Patten Drug Store.

Gary turned to me and said, “Dave, if you get into a fight with a guy from another town, then by jeeze, it’ll be me and you against him back to back; I’ll fight any of his friends who try to hit you from behind. But! If you get into a fight with a guy from the Town of Patten, it’ll be him, me and the rest of the town against you.”

I had no problem with that—I admired them for the way that they stuck together.

Patten had a permanent population of under two thousand people, and the ten or eleven mile ride from town up to the Lodge was very sparsely populated. Finley and Martha Clarke were from Sparrows Point, Maryland, but they were popular with a good number of that small population of local Mainers. Company often dropped in at the Lodge during the evenings and on Sundays. There were great games of cribbage, and some of the best conversation I’ll ever experience.

Ya’ weren’t supposed to believe all of the tall tales that they told as being fully factual, but you really enjoyed hearin’ ‘um.

Photographs by David Robert Crews

Hangin’ around on a Saturday Night at Ballard’s Citco Station in Patten. I took these shots with my first and very inexpensive 35MM camera to show my family and friends back home in Dundalk, Maryland what it was like on a typical Saturday Night hanging out in my new small town.


That’s me second from the left and right where I wanted to be. This was at the girl all the way to the right's birthday party, which happened to be the night before I left for U.S. Army basic training. The girl, Deanna Caldwell, was the first girl I dated up there. Then one night, because I had gone out with Deanna three times another girl wouldn't go out with me because, as the new girl told me that night, in Patten three dates meant that you were going steady. I wasn't ready to settle for one certain girl yet in a town with so many sweet, attractive, teenage darlin's, so I never dated Deanna again. That is my old friend Arnie Ballard enjoying a cuddle with Deanna, and I think that the girl between Arnie and I was Jughead McCarty's steady girlfriend, I just can't remember the pretty girl's name.


Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews