Northern Maine Adventures

One Hell Of An Experience.........

2007-01-19T15:04:00.000-05:00

In November of 1968,
I moved from the suburb of Dundalk, Maryland
up north to Patten, Maine, where
my Uncle Finley owned a hunting lodge named
Katahdin Lodge and Camps
It was there that I became a
Registered Maine Hunting and Fishing Guide,
specializing in guiding Black Bear hunters.
It was also there where I learned how to live
the good life up in the north country
It was one hell of an experience………

Here’s me on my old Moto Ski out in Katahdin Lodge’s front yard, in 1968 or 69, on the morning after a big snowstorm. Notice the piles of snow in front of the cabins where I had shoveled the snow off the roofs just before and during the first part of that storm to keep the roofs from caving in.

I Graduated From Dundalk High School, In Maryland, On June 5, 1968

2007-01-15T20:14:00.000-05:00

After I Graduated high school, I spent the rest of that summer and into the fall wonderin’ if I’d get drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam.

At the time, my father was planning to go deer hunting at my uncle’s hunting lodge during Thanksgiving week of 1968. In early November, Dad had asked me to go along with him on his hunting trip. He knew that I had already put in my two weeks quitin’ notice at the bakery I was delivering bread for, so I was free to go. It was to be my fourth trip up to Katahdin Lodge, and the nearby town of Patten, Maine. My parents had taken my sister and I up to the Lodge for one week vacations during the summers of 1966, ‘67, and ‘68.

On my 1968 summer excursion, as a normal teenage male who was always lookin’ for a teenage female to love, I had become enamored with Patten’s country girls. Patten’s fun loving country boys had made darn sure that I didn’t make the mistake of puttin’ a move on any girl who had a steady boyfriend, but they had shown me where it was safe to take a girl parkin’ and get a car’s windows all steamed up. The people who lived in and around the little town of Patten were very friendly, healthy, and full of life. The town’s folk there didn’t mind if I pursued their unattached, sweet, young ladies.

During that summer of ’68 trip to Maine, I went out with a fine young lady named Deanna Caldwell a few times. We went out for a ride together one evening just after dark to go "spottin' deer." I very politely, quickly asked if anyone else in the Lodge wanted to ride along, but I sure enough did that too quietly for most of them to hear me over the friendly conversations that those Cribbage playing folks were enjoying among themselves. My uncle glanced up at me, waved me on and said that nobody else wanted to go. They all really turned down the invitation because they knew that it was OK for her and I to go be alone together for the first time. Deanna and I drove down an old back road and stopped next to some overgrown farmer's field to look for some deer who mighta' been feeding out there. I took out a flashlight and shined it around briefly to see if we could spot some deer. You never have a gun in the car when you do this, cause the game warden can get ya' for night hunting. There weren't any deer out there in the field, but there was a dear in the car with me. I put my arm around her and looked at her alabaster skin in the moonlight and she glowed soft and oh so beautifully. When I told her this she said, "Oh jeeze, why do all you guys say stuff like that?"

Well I assured her, and I assure you, that she glowed softly and beautifully in the moonlight that was shining down on us and on that dark back road on that fine evening in Maine.

When Deanna was asked by a couple of the other pretty and sweet Patten, Maine girls about me, she replied, "He's quiet, but he's fast."

I weren't all that fast, it's just that they were kinda' old fashioned up there.

I went to my first Northern Maine high school dance over to Island Falls and man o' day did I ever have a good time. I left the dance that night with my dad's big Ford station wagon full of a fairly well balanced mix of teenage girls and guys.

One evening, a couple of the kids showed me where we could by beer underage out at Fifefied's Wildland Store, a place that was so far out the road into the woods that electrical service hadn't made it that far yet--they had propane gas powered refrigeration and lights in there. Fifefield had one of them real old timey, hand crank, glass globed, gasoline pumps that most people have only seen in movies. Just for the fun of it I bought five gallons of gas so that I could use the pump. When I told my dad and uncle about it my uncle laughed and said, "Don't ever buy gas off Fifefield, he waters it down."

On the Friday evening before Thanksgiving Day 1968, my dad and I drove his car up to the Lodge together from Maryland. Then he allowed me the use of the car to run around with the local teenagers.

As they said around the Lodge, Dad went out to hunt four legged deer, and I was after the two legged dear.

Photo by My Former Neighbor Mr. 'Hob' Cox

Here’s me in my back yard in Dundalk, Maryland just before I moved to Maine in 1968.

I Took This Photo With My Inexpensive Instamatic 104

Patten, Maine circa 1967 when Main St. was being repaired and repaved.

Writer's note:

I had a long debate with myself about whether or not I'd write about the underage alcohol drinking aspect of my Maine story. I put it in because it is a part of my story about living in Maine that needs to be in there, or the story would fall short of being a true tale. I am very fortunate that most of my personal experiences as an underage drinker were fun ones. That may be the same for many other former or current underage drinkers, but when the shit hits the fan for an underage drinker it can devastate their life or end it abruptly in an onslaught of horrendous pain. Too many teenage drivers have terrible wrecks when they drive under the influence of alcohol. Too many people who develop devastating drinking problems began drinking in their teens. I do not approve of underage drinking anymore. I am against it all the way.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

My Dad and I Had A Memorable Thanksgiving Day Week At The Lodge.

2007-01-13T15:46:00.000-05:00

During Thanksgiving Day Week of 1968, at Katahdin Lodge, there was a nice covering of snow on the ground. The food was good and plentiful at the Lodge, the paying deer hunters were always in a good mood and my aunt and uncle were too. Each day and evening at the Lodge was ripe with interesting conversation, a lot of friendly joking around, and some good, non-gambling, card games and games of Yatzee. My father never even got to see a deer; he was a tad bit disappointed that he didn't get some venison for our freezer back home, but he loved being out in the woods hunting and being with the other hunters and the Maine Guides.

I was somewhat more successful on my dear hunt though. I was out and about with some fun loving local country kids almost every evening.

At the end of my week long immersion into the warm and wonderful social life of Northern Maine, my dad and I were packed up and ready to get in the car and go back to Maryland. We were saying our final good-byes to my Uncle Finley (Fin) and his wife Martha (Marty) when they suddenly started asking and then darn near begging me to stay at the Lodge and work for them.

I kept sayin’ to my aunt and uncle, "Nah, I’m gonna' go join the Merchant Marines, and sail around the world."

I was figuring that I had between six months and a year before the Draft Board would send me a notice to report to Ft. Holabird, Maryland for my Army induction physical, and if I served a couple of years in the Merchant Marines I couldn’t be drafted.

In an attempt to change my mind, Fin and Marty promised that I would have a great time in the snowy outdoors riding the snowmobiles that they owned, have the use of one of their trucks to go to town in, and be well provided with warm winter work clothes if I stayed.

That convinced me to stay for a while to work and play at the Lodge.

Photography by David Robert Crews

My father leaving Katahdin Lodge to go back to Dundalk, Md. without me in November 1968.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

And Work I Did!! A Minimum of Nine Hours A Day Six Days A Week

2007-01-10T00:43:00.000-05:00

Here I am at 19 years old splittin’ wood for 9-10 hours a day, Monday thru Friday for two weeks in a row. Look at dee' well defined muskules' on 'dem friggin' arms 'uh mine wouldja'! Then besides that 9-10 hours, each day, I had to feed and water the animals, do some outside maintenance work, etc., and then go track wounded bears for our paying hunters, retrieve any dead ones I found, and then come back to the Lodge to gut and skin them. I was aware of how hard I worked, but never actually felt that it was out of the ordinary.

During the winter of 1968-69, there was lots of snow that needed to be shoveled at Katahdin Lodge and Camps. Even as a kid in Maryland, I liked to shovel snow. It’s great exercise. At the Lodge, I learned how to plow snow all night long during a blizzard, with a farm tractor.

I did all kinds of other stuff that I that I had never done before.

I was pressed into service as a carpenter’s, plumber’s, electrician’s, and mechanic’s helper.

I had to split cords of wood for the wood stove, and I still love to split wood. We only had those wood stoves to heat the Lodge with, so my aunt and uncle had taught me how to pack the wood into a wood stove so that it keeps burning smoothly and for the longest time. The only tip that they taught me about using a wood stove that I can give you without showing you is that it is the hot coals from the burning wood in the bottom of a wood stove’s belly that catches the next higher pieces of wood on fire, not the flames from the burning pieces in the lower part of the stove.

There were nine dogs, one horse, and two caged bobcats who became my responsibility for feedin’, waterin,’ and cleaning up after, and them thar' critters and I got along right famously--'cept fur that ornery horse.

I drove four wheel drive trucks all over Northern Maine, in all kinds of weather, and on every type of old, overgrown, rutted, muddy, flooded by a beaver pond, quagmire of a logging road and roller coaster like dirt, gravel, or tar country road. I'd have never made it through all those wild and crazy driving situations if my uncle and some other highly skilled Northern Maine drivers hadn't taught me some serious driving skills and techniques that the average driver never learns. I only got stuck twice in the snow up there during that winter of 1968-69, but one time it was on the hard packed snow out at the side of the road in front of Putt Gerow's tiny country store at Knowles Corner, and old Putt had just laughed lightly, shook his head slightly, then the old woodsman came out and showed me how to ease a vehicle out of a spot like that. I never got stuck in the mud though, and we had some genuine quagmires to drive through at times. And never once did I have a problem driving at the fast and sometimes furious pace required to get things done my uncle’s way. Ask anybody who was up there then, they'll tell ya.

After all that snow melted, I did all of the lawn mowing at the Lodge, and it was a huge yard. Fortunately, I had mowed lawns for money all through my teen years, and I was very proficient at it. I enjoyed it too, in a physical sports challenge sort of a way. Because not only was it another way that I liked to get my physical exercise, it has always been a fun mental challenge and exercise for me to figure out the most sensible mowing pattern to follow for the easiest way to finish each individual lawn and have it looking real good. In my eyes, that job ain’t ever done till the trimming is done right, and I had ways of deftly handling the gasoline powered push mower, like a chain saw artist, to use it do most of the trimming that all you amateurs and pros alike do with one of them gas powered or electric trimmers.

Eventually, I became a Registered Maine Bear Hunting Guide.

That part of the job required me to handle a lot of stinky bear bait--rotting beaver carcasses and slaughterhouse leftovers like cow guts and pig’s heads. That rotting stuff often had maggots crawling all over it, and on hot summer days I had to dip my gloved hands into 55 gallon drums filled with rotting cow guts that had about a six to eight inch layer of wiggling maggots on the top of the mushy guts and there was steam wafting up from the mound of maggots along with a serious stench from the stuff that the maggots were munching on. It stunk us guides up somethin' terrible--we called it "Leave Me Alone Cologne" because nobody wanted to be near us when we had just been working with bait.

I had to go into the woods and track bears for sportsmen who had paid to bear hunt at the Lodge for a week. It was normal for me to follow the blood trails of wounded bears by myself, after dark, and unarmed. Ain't nuthin’ to it–Wild Maine Black Bears usually run from humans. Besides that, having a firearm along would have violated laws that prohibit night hunting. Ya’ wouldn’t want a big, mean, snarlin’ game warden to get me would ya’? I also had to carry any bears that the hunters had killed out of the woods with the help of one or more of the paying hunters and/or other guides. Then the other guides and I gutted and skinned those dead bears.

During the past 30+ years, whenever I’m telling anyone my stories about my Maine adventures, they always think that tracking wounded bears at night without taking a firearm along with me was the most dangerous part of those experiences. That is not so.

The driving was absolutely the most dangerous part of the job. We Katahdin Lodge hunting guides drove over the speed limit ninety-some percent of the time. I usually drove more than 100 miles each day--including on my days off from work when I was just a happy teenager running around the country side with other happy teenagers.

When I was in the pilot’s seat of one of the Lodge’s trucks, I felt perfectly comfortable averaging 10-15 MPH over the posted speed limit, but if my uncle was riding with me I had to fly along those country roads at 15-20 MPH over the limit most of the time. That extra 5-10 MPH meant that I couldn’t hardly ever relax at all during the driving, because I wasn’t as highly skilled at it as my uncle was.

Those Maine-iac drivers had taught me well though, I assure you that I was very safe to ride with most of the time--nobody's perfect.

But my safe driving sure as hell scared the be-jeezus out of a few paying bear hunters each week when they were my passengers in one of the Lodge's pickup trucks, and they hadn't yet gotten to know that I could definitely handle driving a truck on them roads at those speeds. Then sometimes a couple of fun loving, thrill seeking, city guys, who were at the Lodge on a bear hunt, would egg me on to git-it-on at top speeds when I was just tooling along conversing with them nice and relaxed like while driving at mere high speeds.

I always enjoyed the challenges and the satisfactions of making it from point A to point B to point Z all day long without a mishap while using those finely honed driving skills of mine to be that safe at such high speeds on those rough roads. But, it was still the most dangerous part of the job.

That’s how I earned my keep at Katahdin Lodge and Camps in Patten, Maine.

Photo of Bobby Taken Very Carefully by David Robert Crews

Bobby the male caged Bobcat with a rabbit that I went out and hunted for the Bobcats, so that they could have some natural food.

Photo of Roberta Taken Extremely Carefully
by David Robert Crews
(because she was a lot meaner than Bobby)

This is the Lodge's three legged female Bobcat, poor Roberta. She had been caught in a Fox trapper's leg hold trap, and he did not get there to free her till she had almost chewed her leg completely off. He knew that she'd never survive in the wild like this, so he brought her up to the Lodge to live in the cage with Bobby.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

Fittin’ In With The Locals Wasn’t Easy

2006-12-27T15:34:00.000-05:00

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

Everyone Respected Finley’s Ability To Outwork Anyone

2006-12-26T20:28:00.000-05:00

My Uncle Finley K. Clarke, Fin, was usually the first one to start working and/or hunting in the morning, and he was at it all day and all through the evening till well after dark. He had a saying that I have been in tune with since long before I ever heard him say it, "If something is worth doing, it is worth doing right."

He had bought the lodge in 1965 with money saved up from working a lot of overtime layin’ brick at the Bethlehem Steel Mill in Sparrows Point, Maryland. All of the guys at the mill called him, "Loud Mouthed Finley Clarke."

Where ever he was, he would often let lose a steady, bombastic, tirade of facts and opinions towards any person who happened to be near him. He’d tell anybody just what he thought of them. It didn’t matter if they were paying hunters, local Mainers he did business with, or powerful politicians. He also had a subtle way of forcefully raising the volume of his voice, just slightly above everyone else’s, to the point where all ears within hearing distance of him unwittingly tuned into what he was saying and he became the center of everyone's attention.

When I was working at the Lodge in 1977 and 1979, I overheard my Uncle Finley tell some hunters a story about the time that he was down at the Maine State House in Augusta and was waiting out in the crowded State House lobby for a legislative session to begin when one of his numerous adversaries asked him, "Well Finley, what are you down here for this time?"

Fin replied with something about, "Well let me tell you. I’m tired of the Indians and the niggers and…..," and I wish that I could remember the rest that he had repeated of what he had said in the State House lobby that day; he always ended the story with a huge smile on his face as he said, "And you should'a seen them all moving away from me, heh-heh-heh."

Finley had been going down to the State House all through the 1970s to fight for new laws and better funding for the roads and other infrastructure around the Patten Maine area. Finley did do some good—he got the one bear killed per hunter per season and no cubs killed laws on the books. During those times in the legislative chambers he was witness to a lot of legislative action about the Indians up in Maine fighting for the rights promised to them in old treaties with the United States, and the Indians were finally winning what was theirs to begin with. Finley hated that.

Many people loved the way that he acted, but he made a lot of life long enemies.

I marveled at how he never got into fisticuffs with other men. But, then, he was well over six feet tall, weighed about right for a well fed, hard working man, and was an expert with fire arms. He kept his many guns cleaned and well oiled. That being said, Finley never threatened, nor insinuated that he would physically harm anyone.

He had won a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star in the Korean War. He was a war hero, but he said that he "never did anything more than any other man over there."

The depth of admiration, respect, or hatred which he received from other people was amazing.

Photography by David Robert Crews

Fin surrounded by family and friends on a Sunday afternoon at Katahdin Lodge during the spring of 1969. That’s Gary Glidden on his Triumph 650 Motorcycle and his wife Cathy in the background with the helmet on, Marge is on the back of Gary's bike and her husband Morris is standing in the doorway. Morris and Marge were old time Mainers who were very good friends with Fin and Marty and frequent visitors to the Lodge. I really enjoyed their company. Marty is standing behind the motorcycle.

That’s Fin lookin’ at ya’, me with my back to ya’ and two hunters who volunteered to help cleanup after my two weeks of splittin’ wood 9-10 hours a day for the 5 weekdays of each week. I was in some kinda' good physical shape, no doubt about it.

During the Korean War, Finley had spent the better part of a full year over there, fighting hard, on the front lines. He experienced the complete deal. Death was all around and all over him at times. As a result of the time that he spent in that war,

Finley had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I know the signs of war induced PTSD.

I am a Vietnam Era Army Veteran. I know and have known several Vietnam combat veterans who are victims of war induced PTSD. A few I have known for years and others were fellow patients with me in Veterans Hospitals, when I spent a total of six months in three different VA Hospitals, because of my non-service connected degenerative back disease.

Combat connected PTSD has a certain flavor to it, or a distinct, intense style, you might say. Instant overpowering anger is one of the outwardly visible indications of that disorder.

I once saw a hospitalized Nam Vet pick up the heavy, metal, bedside hospital cabinet in his room and throw it out the door of his room and across the hall against the opposite wall—just because the kitchen staff had put a little pile of horseradish on his dinner plate and he had instructed them not too. Later that week, that hospitalized Nam Vet was napping in the middle of the afternoon, and he had a reoccurring, combat related nightmare. Several nurses stood at his door gawking in on him, as I walked by and saw him in there tossing and turning and moaning and groaning ferociously. It appalled me to see him suffer while they stood there grinning in at his bad nightmare. I spoke to him about it later, and he got real upset, because he had told the hospital staff to wake him up and stop that dream when it reoccurred. The dream was about the moment that his best friend was shot through the head and had died in his arms there in a muddy, bloody trench in Vietnam. That Nam Vet had PTSD.

Other Nam Vets I know have let loose with similar angry actions when I was there to witness them. I understand them about as much a person who's never seen combat can, but not everyone does.

One old Nam Vet ex-neighbor of mine, Joe S., who gets a 100% combat related disability check each month from the Veterans Administration, has a terrible drinking problem. While getting drunk in rough bars, Joe has had his nose broken five times, his neck broken severely once and his ankle stomped on and cracked.

One time Joe started going off on an uncalled for tirade and acting crappy at a keg party we were at, and I had to jump on the back of a big ignorant jackass to pull that asshole off Joe and keep him from pounding half-crippled-up Joe into the earth; and the big natural-born asshole who was beating Joe up was an old long time drinkin’ and druggin' buddy of his. More than once, I have had Joe go off on an angry tirade towards me over some harmless thing I said to him which was immediately twisted all out of shape in his mind, and I had to control myself and not knock my Nam Vet buddy to the ground myself.

I had to control myself many times while working for my uncle and not knock him to the ground either. My uncle wasn't half crippled up though and he was a lot bigger and at least a little stronger than me in 1968-69 when I was 18-19 years old and he was about twice my age, so unless I managed to knock his lights out for a few minutes he would have gotten back up off the ground and I may have been pounded into the earth myself.

Finley often displayed the same type of anger as that hospitalized Vietnam Veteran had.

Finley Clarke was infamous for his angry outbreaks. It happened almost everyday and in anyplace at any time in front of anybody and to anybody. He would throw things around a lot. Things like salt and pepper shakers that had become clogged up a bit got thrown in the trash, mail that came to the Lodge in his name often got thrown right into the trash, and he usually never even looked to see who had sent it to him. Tools, pieces of lumber, and other things he might be working with got thrown around. He once threw an old tire at me from the bed of a pickup truck, because it was in his way and I did not see that it was in time to remove it from there before he got his hands on it. His never ending inner drive to work harder than everyone else and do everything exactly right may be at least partially a symptom of his PTSD.

When my Uncle Finley came home from Korea he was asked to go on a live TV program and be awarded his combat medals with his whole family there on the TV stage along side of him. My Grandparents, Finley’s younger brother Nelson, and my mother all went out and bought nice new clothes to wear on that TV show’s stage. They were all excited about it. But Uncle Finley couldn’t deal with it, he canceled out on that one. That was when he first said that he never did anymore than any other man over there. He also said that to me, and several paying hunters, one sunny afternoon in 1979, when we were all standing in the driveway at Katahdin Lodge, and I mentioned to the hunters that he had earned those three meritorious combat medals.

Several years before my mother died, she told me about that no show on the TV program, I told her that Finley had PTSD, and she said, "Oh, he was a mess back then when he first came home from Korea."

My Uncle Finley Kenneth Clarke had combat related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

Martha Clarke Was A Working Class, Steel Mill Town Woman

2006-12-21T14:33:00.000-05:00

Photography by David Robert Crews

My Aunt Martha Clarke, Marty, knew that working in her husband’s business afforded her the opportunity to attain far more financial success and social prominence than she ever could by working at the office job which she had held, in the same steel mill Fin was layin’ brick at, when they had moved to Maine.

Marty never had any children, but I believe that Fin and Marty were securely in love and that they made love often. I don’t know if they had ever discovered what the unfortunate, medical reason was which had prevented them from conceiving a child.

At the lodge, Marty was head cook and bottle washer, did all of the chores that a hotel maid does, and handled all of the business correspondence, bookkeeping duties, payroll, and telephone traffic. She could hold her own in just about any conversation ever heard at the Lodge, and her propensity for telling dirty jokes was famous. She got along well with most of the hunters, but she would often gossip about a few of them after they left, and sometimes it was for a long time after the hunters left.

Unfortunately for all of us who worked at the Lodge, Marty never showed any appreciation for the hard, dangerous, multi-faceted work which we guides did for her financial gain; she cheated us out of our pay and/or time off from work anytime that she could get away with it. I have heard from friends of mine in Maine and also my family down in Maryland that Fin’s favorite hunting guide, John Birmingham, had quit working at the Lodge after Marty had refused to give the man a raise in salary which Fin had told the guide that he was supposed to have received and that John had definitely earned. John is one of the most competent, most highly regarded woodsman in Northern Maine. He is the best shot who I have ever seen shoot a firearm. John Birmingham is as good as they get when it comes to Maine Hunting and Fishing Guides. The most defining detail about Martha Clarke which that situation exposes is that John was at the time, and always will be, the closest to being the son who Finley always wanted.

One thing that Marty hated to see was Fin or any of us guides taking a well deserved break during the day. No matter how long we had been out there working or how hot and sweaty and dirty or cold and wet and dirty we were when we sat down in the Lodge for a break she'd usually try to saunter on by and prod us about some pending or partly completed task.

Even during a blizzard she only allowed me to come into the Lodge to warm up for ten or fifteen minutes after every two or three hours of plowing fast falling snow. Fin had been out of state on National Guard duty when a big blizzard struck and three feet of powdery snow fell on top of two and a half feet of hard packed snow in two days. After I had plowed snow all day, most of the night, and through the next day during that blizzard, my aunt had pointed out the healthy red complexion on my cheeks that the wind driven snow had given me. Then she said to me, with a squint on her face, "Now doesn’t that feel good? Do you know how much it would have cost me to hire a bulldozer and its operator to come up here and clear all of that snow off of the driveway after the blizzard ended if you hadn’t kept it plowed? A hundred dollars."

Conquering that ferocious storm felt great to me!

It was tough going though: I had to jump off the tractor now and then to crawl down under it and put the chains back on the tires; the snow banks around the Lodge's horseshoe shaped driveway got too high for the tractor's wide, hydraulic scooped manure bucket to lift up over them when I had to dump a full load of snow out of it, so I had to take the buckets of snow across the two-lane-macadam-country road out front to dump them. Fortunately there was no through traffic at all on it during the storm.

But I had to constantly be on the lookout for those huge flying wedge snowplows that they use up there. Those humongous machines pretty well had the right of way most of the time, and one of them could have killed me in a collision between the two of us. Them fellers and me had the road out there in front of the Lodge to ourselves for about two days straight.

Right there a short way down the road south of the Lodge there is a good sized blind hill. It has a wicked quick drop over a rather sharp edge when driving south past the Lodge, and any vehicle driving north past the Lodge comes haulin' ass up over that hill top at a good pace, because there is another hill of that same height and shape about a half mile past the first hill, so either way ya go it is down one hill fast and then a vehicle gains great momentum to send the driver up the next tall hill fast and smooth. When the drivers are down near and at the bottom of the deep dip between the two steep hills them drivers can't see if any vehicles will be coming at them in the other lane, and maybe hangin' over the double yellow lines a bit dangerously into the other driver's lane. Nor can a driver who is down in the dip or climbing quickly up the next hill see any large, furry obstructions innocently stepping out of the deep woods on both sides of the road.

Any driver heading north who wants to pull into the Lodge's driveway has to begin to slow down as soon as they crest the hill, and then they turn left into the driveway. But any drivers heading north who are not stopping at the Lodge usually come flying up over the crest of the northern hill top at a good rate of speed, even though they had just climbed way up a steep hill, because they had just rolled fast (and easy on the gas) down the equally sized and shaped southern hill, which had given the vehicle a "fire the booster rockets now" effect. And the solid gripped feeling of the forward pull of the gravity at the bottom of the dip gave it all a naturally added, smooth flowing, thrilling inertia which was damn near inebriating.

When them there humongous bladed snow plows came by the Lodge heading northbound, charging madly, they looked like prehistoric, big and hefty, recently shaved Mastodons heading for warmer latitudes. Those snow plume spttin', northbound heavy metal beasts flew down the south hill, and then up the north hill, and then they snowblasted on by the Lodge at a steady rate of speed. If I was out there with that tractor cross ways on the road, being all blurred out looking due to the sideways flying snow, and sitting there with the tractor's front bucket held out as far as I could force it over top of the ten foot and higher snow bank on the opposite side of the road, the many, many moments whenever I was in that position the snowplow drivers coming northbound down and up over the hill did not have enough time to stop before they plowed into me.

Sadly, that poor excuse for a loving, caring, kind and considerate Aunt Martha of mine never thanked me in any way at all for my long hours of hard, dangerous work out in the freezing cold nor did she ever tell anyone but my equally ungrateful Uncle Finley that I had done all of that plowing by myself. And she had only told him because he had seen on the TV weather reports that the storm was hitting us and it was obvious that someone had to plow the driveway so he had called her to make sure that it got done. He never asked her to put me on the phone though so that he could thank me for being there way up in the woods when he and his wife needed me or to tell me that I was doing a great job for them or to acknowledge that I had most certainly, successfully entered the domain of men in Maine who were not afraid of working hard outside in the roughest weather.

When I first lived and worked for my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley, my life was ruled by the mistaken, immature impression that family members are always nurturing to, supportive of, and loving towards one another.

Photography by David Robert Crews

John Birmingham in front of Katahdin Lodge's Land Rover (a real Land Rover) in the winter of 1969. John was home on leave from the U.S. Army, before he went to Vietnam. But before he entered the Army, he worked for Fin and Marty as a hunting guide. I learned how to drive a standard transmission with a stick shift in that old Rover. Notice the pile of snow up against that old wooden building in the background, it got there when Finley and I had shoveled it off the roof when that roof was about to cave in from the weight of four foot deep snow.

Photography by David Robert Crews

Marty going snowshoeing back to Hale Pond with Chet and Susan Chase. Chet was a teacher at Katahdin High School. Notice the piles of snow on either side of the door back there, they got there when I shoveled off the Lodge's roof every single time it snowed that winter.

Finley was my mother’s younger brother. Our family was very close when I was growing up, and both my mother’s and father’s families knew Martha’s family, so my entire family’s relationship with Martha Clarke stretched back long before I was born. Marty lived next door to my mother’s and Finley’s family in the small, friendly, crime free mill town of Sparrows Point, Maryland. Marty was like a sister to my mother when they were growing up. Fin and Marty knew my father’s family, the Crews side of our family, for their entire lives because for many years they had all lived in Sparrows Point too, and most of the families down there knew each other the same as families usually do in all small towns anywhere in the world. Both of my parents and Martha grew up "on the Point".

After my parents got married, and then Fin married the girl next door, Marty, we had all lived close to each other and visited each other’s homes frequently. From the day I was born till 1965, when Fin and Marty moved to Maine, we saw each other on every holiday at my Grandparents Clarke’s home, except for our family’s annual Fourth of July picnic, which was held, by my parents, every year at my house. Those were great get-togethers complete with huge home cooked meals and lotsa' family fun. Uncle Finley (called Uncle Kenneth by us back then) and Aunt Martha came to every birthday party given for me, my two sisters, mother and father which were held every year at my house. My Uncle Kenneth was in the Army Reserves and during a few of his frequent visits to my home when there was no party going on, when I was a young kid, he used to bring me really cool army stuff like real steel helmets, a combat back pack, and a periscope from an army tank. He also used to build little plastic scale models of army vehicles, and when he got tired of displaying them in his Dundalk, Maryland home, he gave them to me to play with. We were all as close as a family can be.

I lost those wonderful family ties between my aunt and uncle and I when I tried to live with and work for that pair of selfish people up in the Great North Woods of Maine and to have the finest kind of a time with them two natural born ingrates and the local population of fun loving Mainers and other good folks who came up to enjoy the hunting and other outstanding outdoors recreation opportunities up there.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

In May Of 1969, I Was Still Living And Working At The Lodge, But I Wanted To Leave There To Go Join The Merchant Marines

2006-12-11T15:26:00.000-05:00

Somehow or the other Fin, with Marty's approval, had convinced Game Warden Ted Hanson to give me a Registered Maine Hunting and Fishing Guide’s License.

One day during May of 1969, Ted drove up to the Lodge, walked in and sat down at the long dining room table there, as our visitors often did, and Finley told me to sit down across the table from Ted and that Ted was a game warden who was there to give me my test for a Registered Maine Guide’s License. Ted asked me a batch of required questions which Fin gave most of the answers for. The only question I can remember is, "Can you cook and bake over an open fire?" Fin was standing there behind me the whole time, and he laughed lightly as he said over my shoulder to Ted, "He’s learning"; I was pretty well at a loss for words the whole time anyway. But that question struck a cord in me, because I was interested in learning how to cook over an open fire and especially bake delicious homemade goodies, because some Mainer friend of Fin and Marty’s, whom I was playing a game of Cribbage with at the Lodge one day, had told me about one of the most famous old time, long dead, local Maine Guides who used to bake the most delicious biscuits on a campfire. I never did learn to bake over an open fire, but I can sure as hell cook good meals over a campsite fire. The questioning ended right after Fin informed Ted that I would only be employed to guide bear hunters and not deer hunters or fishing parties till I had learned a lot more about the vast woods of Northern Maine and I had become proficient at the profession of being a Maine Guide. And I was handed my Registered Maine Hunting and Fishing Guide’s License for the year of 1969.

It was a complete surprise to me.

Welp’, the way that it was for me at the time was that I loved working in and just being out in the woods, I loved the Patten Mainers, I loved my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley, but now I was really stuck at the Lodge for I didn't know how long. Because by having them two finagling relatives of mine get the game warden to give me a professional guide’s license, Fin and Marty had underhandedly let me know that I was expected to stay and work at the Lodge through the entire upcoming summer bear hunting season.

If I had refused to accept the guide’s license and told Fin and Marty that it was time for me to go join the Merchant Marines, before they were ready to let me go, it would have incited them into raging anger. Fin and Marty relied on my help to keep their business going. The main reason that they needed me to stay and help them to keep their business going is that most of the local Maine men didn’t want to work at Katahdin Lodge, because Fin would frequently verbally abuse any of his guides who didn’t walk out on him the first time that he yelled at them. He cussed and hollered at me every single day. I was only 18 years old–too young and too confused by Fin and Marty’s bull crap to know how to stand up against them.

One part of the reason that I stayed and accepted the guide’s license along with that professional Maine Guide’s position at the Lodge was that I had no money to go catch a bus or plane to leave, because my aunt and uncle hadn’t paid me a weekly salary. I was painfully aware that if I left against their wishes that they would never give me the money that I knew I had earned from them, and they would have told me something like, "hoof it on back home gahdamnit if you don’t appreciate all that we are doing for you."

Grant it, I appreciated having the opportunity to get to know the local Mainers, to date sweet and pretty Maine girls, to ride snowmobiles and learn to walk on snowshoes, to spend time out in the woods. But I had an obligation to serve my country in some military manner, and I was determined to choose my branch of service before the U.S. Army or the U.S. Marine Corp drafted me. I love my family and my country more than life itself. I have been ready to die to defend my country-my family ever since as a child in elementary school I got a grasp on the meaning of our necessity to continually be on guard for our freedom. The only reason that I was intent on joining the Merchant Marines to stay out of the Vietnam War was because it looked to me that that war wasn’t truly defending my country from communism.

Had I left to go join the Merchant Marines, as I had told that pair of selfish, self centered individuals that I had planned to do before and all during the time I was living and working at their business, my aunt and uncle would have made a big, bad deal out of it amongst our family—them two would have turned everything around to their benefit and vilified me. Fin and Marty would have told everyone something to the effect that I had quit on them when they needed me most and that they had treated me like a son and given me more than I deserved. This would have caused a great rift within our family if that had that happened, because some of my family members would have sided with them two and some with me.

My Grandmother and Grandfather Clarke believed that their son Finley was God’s gift to the planet earth. Ever since Finley was a little child his parents had taught him that he was better than everyone else. To my knowledge, Finley K. Clarke never in his life outright admitted to doing anything wrong. Finley’s parents had visited the lodge while I was working there and had seen how horribly he was mistreating me, but they didn’t care.

My father’s side of the family wasn’t aware of just how bad my situation was at the time. If my Grandmother and Grandfather Crews had known that I was being so thoroughly abused and cheated by Fin and Marty, they would have gotten mad as hell at all of the Clarkes. Both sides of my family had lived within a few miles of where I grew up in Maryland. We all visited each other frequently when I was growing up.

The bottom line here is that I had to stay at the Lodge to avoid starting a family feud. It was put upon my young, yet worldly, shoulders to suffer and sacrifice silently in order to keep our families together.

Very Old Photograph by A Very Young Davy Boy

This is my Grandmom Crews on the left and my Grandmom Clarke on the right at a family picnic in my backyard in Dundalk, Maryland.

One thing that really hurt me deeply, about the situation in Maine, was that I could never allow my Grandmom and Granddad Crews to come visit me at the Lodge. When Fin started in on his daily verbally abusing me, my paternal grandparents would have gotten thoroughly upset and told Fin and Marty just how lousy of a pair of relatives that they were for the way that they treated me.

My Granddad Crews was a fisherman and not having the pleasure of showing him some fantastic fishing and other fine times in the Great Outdoors of Maine is a loss that I can’t seem to get past. He was an old West Virginia mountain boy, who worked most of his life in the blast furnaces of the steel mill that Fin and Marty had worked for. He retired as the foreman of the two largest furnaces there. Those foremen were good with the men, good with a shovel and good with the overhead cranes, in a hot, dirty and very dangerous place–all around about the hardest working men I ever knew of. He was just the kinda fellow that my older friends in Maine would have enjoyed getting to know. He was a self taught car mechanic, and he would have tried to get into working on the Lodge’s trucks or something, if he had come up to stay there with us for a week or so.

My Grandmom Crews was a Welshwomen who came to America, during World War One, as a US Army Captain’s children’s nanny. She was about as good as they get at home cooking and other homemaking skills. She would have fit right in with the country women who worked for Marty at the Lodge. My Grandmom Crews would have pitched in and helped around the Lodge, if I could have invited them up for a visit. She would'a definitely had to get into that kitchen and cook something for the crowd at the Lodge. She and Granddad would’ve made some good friends amongst the Mainers I knew.

Fin and Marty haven’t spoken to anyone on either side of my family for many, many years. It is a gahddamned shame that my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley had to be so greedy, self serving, and ignorant that they destroyed all relationship with my entire family.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

A Great Partnership Developed between Myself And Another Hunting Guide.

2006-12-11T15:25:00.000-05:00

Gary Glidden became my mentor when he came back to work for my uncle a few weeks before the 1969 summer bear season opened. He was the finest kind of all around woodsman.

Outdoorsman like him don’t get lost in the woods, and they’re never at a loss for telling a good story

Gary and I spent many hours driving around together putting the bear bait out in the woods, showing the hunters where to sit and watch their bait, coaching them on how to hunt for bear, and making sure that the hunters were safely out of the woods each night after legal hunting hours were over. We were always admiring the scenery, talkin’ about everything and everybody, and stopping now and then to enjoy doing business with the local merchants. Gary introduced me to some of Patten’s most interesting and unique local characters; he taught me a lot about how to live a good life up in Maine.

His wife, Cathy, worked in the lodge for Marty, and Cathy became a treasured friend of mine too. In the small town, close knit community that I was living in up there, one word from Gary or Cathy that I was any kind of a risk factor to the local folk’s safety or well being and Fin would have had to send me away from there.

During the summer of 1968, when I was visiting the Lodge while on vacation, Gary had given me my very first introduction into the social life of typical Patten teenagers when he had two of his sisters have one of their boyfriends drive them up to the Lodge to take me out for an evening on the town. The full story of that very memorable summer evening of my life is written out in full in my short story named The Day I Fell I Love With Patten Maine.

Photography by David Robert Crews

Gary and Cathy Glidden, and I do believe she's a goosin' him!

Photography by David Robert Crews

Katahdin Lodge and Camps on a Sunday afternoon in 1969, as seen from Bobby Smallwood’s plane. Old photo from my first 35MM camera. It was inexpensive, but I like some of these shots that I got with it.

I was with Bobby Smallwood’s daughter Barbara, my steady girlfriend, one Saturday evening, parkin’ out in back of a potato field when Bobby and Gary flew over us at treetop level; they were out lookin’ to see wildlife comin’ out to eat at dusk time, which Bobby often did in that two seater plane with Gary, or Mrs. Smallwood, or my Uncle Finley, or other folks. Holy o' jeezus that were some scary night when I took her home after our date (15 minutes early instead of 20-30 minutes late that time), but Bobby never said nuthin’ to me about it till I went down there the next afternoon to see Barbara on our regular Sunday date. I walked into their house through the kitchen door and her mother said a normal pleasant hello to me as she continued preparing their usual big Sunday supper, then bravely, but a might bit meekishly, I eased on in towards their living room where Bobby was sitting and reading the Sunday paper. Ole' Bobby dropped his paper down a few inches, looked up at me with a big wide smile on his face and said, "Well hellooo theah Dave, ya been in any potato fields lately ?" And that were all!

I had already seen Gary at the Lodge that morning, and he hadn't spoken to me he simply had grinned at me, real big and broad, that was very unnerving. All that morning, I had no idea who was in the back seat of Bobby's plane till Gary grinned at me like that, but I knew that it wasn't my uncle in the plane, because he hated to see me date Barbara and would have somehow made my morning quite miserable if he had even known about it at the time. Fin hated to see me with Barbara because Bobby was his best friend and Fin thought that I might get her pregnant and that Bobby would hold Fin responsible and then their friendship would end. Gary was all too aware of that brutally ignorant Finley factor, so he never ever said a word about it to my uncle, my aunt, or anyone else at the Lodge.

I never heard a word about it from Barbara's mother, but miracle of miracles in the normally faster than a radio signal small town gossip circuit it took two weeks before Finley heard about it. That was because Gary, Bobby, and Mrs. Smallwood were protecting me from Finley, but they each had to eventually tell someone the story, because it was just too hilarious for them to keep to themselves--can't blame 'um for that. When Fin found out, he really rubbed it into me, and for a couple weeks every new group of bear hunters heard about it during the week. I could easily detect that there was a barely perceptible weird, evil tinge to his voice and mannerisms when he was doing the rubbing in on me, because Fin seriously, viciously, hated it that I was dating Barbara.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

When The Paying Bear Hunters Started Coming In

2006-12-11T15:22:00.000-05:00

When the paying bear hunters started coming in, Fin And Gary Told Me That Our Most Important Responsibility As Their Guides Was To Protect Them From Their Own Mistakes. Even though most hunters were competent individuals, they were all handling loaded firearms, and there was a great, expansive forest to get lost in where we took them hunting. We three Registered Maine Guides strictly enforced all of the rules of safe, legal hunting. We also did our best to see that everyone enjoyed themselves and had a lot of laughs.

Most of our paying guests had a real good time in Maine. We had many satisfied customers in 1969, and our hunters got over half of the bears reported killed in the State of Maine that year.

Some of the hunters liked my wild and wooly ways so much that they gave me an open invitation to visit them if I was ever in their hometown.

Unfortunately, some of our paying hunters felt great animosity towards Fin, because he had verbally assaulted or offended them at some time during their one week stay at the Lodge. Some of them had spoken to me about these incidents when no one else was around but the other hunters who agreed with them. Those hunters had witnessed the way that Fin and Marty treated me, and they didn't like it. They were all aware that Katahdin Lodge provided honest-all-out-effort bear hunts with clean, comfortable lodging and lots of good homemade food to eat, but for the money they had paid Fin and Marty they expected to be treated with complete respect at all times. Then after a few days of experiencing the way that Finley talked to some of them at times, and they felt that they had gotten to know me well enough to realize that I wasn't happy about that bullshit, they spoke candidly to me about it. That was a difficult aspect of my adventures in Maine to stomach; Finley was after all, first and foremost, my uncle.

Fin took this photo of Gary and I, because it was the first time that hunters at Katahdin Lodge had gotten 4 bears in one day.

That’s one my favorite hats that I have on, a green Efrennam Crusha’. I wore outa’ few of them, and I still have the last one I bought in Patten, and it’s some kinda’ broke in, let me tell you.

Photography by David Robert Crews

This is up over Rt. 11, about halfway between the Lodge and Patten, looking out into the Great North Maine Woods that stretches out for 90+ miles behind Katahdin Lodge.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

Despite All Of The Fun And Success I Was Having, I Often Felt Miserable

2006-12-11T15:18:00.000-05:00

Everyday at the Lodge I was the brunt of loud, devastating verbal abuse from my Uncle Finley. Both Fin and Marty belittled and embarrassed me in front of everyone. They did that to cover up the fact that they owed me a lot, and they were too selfish and self centered to admit it. The abuse got worse as my guiding skills and abilities improved, and their debt to me increased.

Fin and Marty nicknamed me "nummer", as in ‘numb brained’, because Fin would be yelling and hollering and cussing at me right up in my face and the only way that I could keep from sluggin’ him in his teeth was to sort of block it all out and go numb. Sometimes he’d yell at me to cover up his own blunders and put the blame on me. Like the time he took my brand new Triumph 250 Motorcycle out for a ride and destroyed an engine part because he was showing off in front of everyone by racing down the road at full throttle.

A manufacturer’s sticker on the bike’s speedometer read, "do not drive this motorcycle over 50 miles per hour for the first 500 miles." The bike died on him when he was doing over 70 mph with a mere 71 miles on the odometer.

When the bike died, Fin was passing Harley Libby who was driving his pick up truck with two or three of his sons in it. Fin and Harley were both driving up Rt. 11 towards the Lodge, and that old native Mainer Harley always drove that road at 65-75 miles an hour. Ole’ Harley Libby had stopped and put the bike on the back of his truck and given Fin a ride back to the Lodge. When the truck pulled into the Lodge's driveway, I was out there working in the yard with a shovel in my hand. A few of the hunters came out of the Lodge to help take my broke down motorcycle off the back of the truck, and when Fin saw them coming out of the Lodge he walked over to where I was standing there getting quietly pissed off about him screwing up my brand new motorcycle and that G.D.S.O.B. Finley started chewing me out viciously.

He kept saying "That’s your g**damned motorcycle, and it’s your g**damned fault!!"

At the same time he was quick checking over his shoulder to make sure that Harley, his sons who were with him, and the hunters were watching me get the blame for it all. Loud mouthed Finley Clarke looked like a pigeon peckin' on freshly scattered feed while glancing all around to see what other birds might try to take some from him. It was right f***king soul shattering for me.

I woulda' never hit my Uncle Fin, or any man, upside his head with the shovel I had in my hand at the time, though the thought of doing that did zoom right through the middle of my mind, but that loud mouthed bully never knew how close he was to having me knuckle-punch a few of his teeth out. I just stood there with that shovel's handle in my hands while looking him straight in his face, and feeling numb; as I did I kept glancing from his evasive eyes down to his flapping mouth. He had some bad cavities in his front teeth, which I knew would cause them rotten pegs to break off if I punched him as hard as I was considering doing. Fin was a big man, but I was a hard working young man at the time, and I was in plenty good enough shape to knock him off his feet with one justifiably angry, mighty swing of my fist. It would have made a bad situation worse though, so I kept quiet till he got through acting like a self centered pigeon and walked into the Lodge.

Then I went back to doing his shovel work for him again.

Photography by David Robert Crews

My Triumph 250.

In August Of 1969, My Army Draft Notice Arrived In The Mail At The Lodge

2006-12-11T14:48:00.000-05:00

In August 0f 1969, my U.S. Army draft notice arrived in the mail at the Lodge. It was a great relief. I was saved from my desperate dilemma. My draft notice was my ticket to get away from Fin and Marty.

If I let the Army draft me, I was afraid that they would probably put me in the infantry and send me to Vietnam. I based my fear on the fact that people all around the world knew that an infantryman in Vietnam had a short life expectancy.

A few days after receiving my draft letter, I went down to the Army Recruiting Office in Bangor, Maine and found out that I was probably going to be drafted into the Army in less than two weeks from that day. The best thing for me to do was to immediately sign up for the Army. This would give me the opportunity to choose an Army school to attend that would train me in a skill which I could use if I made it through the Vietnam War and back into civilian life. I chose Photographic Laboratory Technician School. The Army instructed me to report to Ft. Dix New, Jersey for basic training on November 17, 1969.

My first day at the US Army Photo Lab Tech School.

It wasn’t the Merchant Marines, but I was still going to get to travel and see new places. Best of all, I was finally going to be free from Fin and Marty’s ignorant treatment of me. The entire time that I worked for them, they never said one, single complimentary word to me about the outstanding accomplishments that I had made as a bear hunting guide. They never thanked me for doing anything at any time.

I had no way out of there, till my draft notice came; I didn’t have the money for bus or plane fare out of there; I never received a regular pay check. My weekly pay had been ten or twenty bucks on a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon and the use of a pick up truck with a full gas tank to go to town.

In October of 1969, I left the lodge to go back to see my family in Maryland for a few weeks, before facing the possibility of death in Vietnam. The night before I left, Marty gave me $350.00 cash. She said it was what I would have had saved up if they had paid me a full salary. It wasn’t right. Ten months at $125.00 a week was the fair wage.

According to my calculations and after deducting the cash payments I received from Fin and Marty, I still come up with a figure of at least $4,250.00 that they owe me from 1969–not including accrued interest.

That calculation was done in 1969 money values, and I only used the 1969 part of their debt to me here, I have since then added what they also owe me from 1977 + 1979 then converted the amounts to year 2002 dollars, and I came up with $27,500.15 that they owe me. The amount has gone up since then due to inflation and now I want interest on the money.

I am a disabled veteran living on such a small fixed income, well below the poverty level, that I couldn’t and still can’t go to Maine and pursue this matter up there in person.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

I Want My Back Pay And The Respect That I Earned

2006-12-11T14:46:00.000-05:00

During the entire time that I worked long, hard hours for my Aunt Martha and my Uncle Finley K. Clarke, they never, ever said one complimentary word to me, or as far as I know about me, concerning the accomplishments that I made as suburban kid who became a Maine Guide. They never thanked me for the doing the multi-faceted, often difficult and sometimes bear-bait-stinky work that I did for them. They never acknowledged the dangers that I faced and survived daily - while working for them. That work required considerable natural abilities. It also often required me to either already posses or to learn various skills. It did not matter to Fin and Marty that I fell into the Northern Maine social life and fit right in. And those Mainers are infamous for not allowing people "from the outside" into their lives. Fin and Marty had no respect at all for the way that I handled their paying guests and showed those individuals good, safe, fun times in the vast woods of Northern Maine. Those two selfish relatives of mine have yet to pay me all of the money that they owe me.

While I was in the Army and stationed on Okinawa (thank god not Vietnam), I spent many hours mulling over the way that I was mistreated by my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley. I knew that I didn’t want to work at the Lodge for the rest of my life, or strictly in the hunting business, after I got out of the Army. I realized that if I didn’t work for Fin and Marty in Maine that they’d never help me to get a job at any other outdoors adventure outfitter anywhere or to start my own guiding business somewhere else. I used to think that after I was discharged from the Army it would be fantastic to travel around the world working for outdoor recreational businesses which catered to the kinds of campers, hikers, nature photographers, cross country skiers, snowmobile riders, hunters, etc. who like to eat meals cooked and baked over a camp fire.

But due to Fin and Marty’s selfishness, after I was discharged, I could not use my accomplishments at Katahdin Lodge to convince any outdoors adventure outfitter to hire me, because Fin and Marty would never have given me the honest employment reference that a responsible business owner would require before allowing me to guide their paying clients. The way that my aunt and uncle saw things was: either I came back to work for them for the rest of my life as their lifelong, subservient, under paid scapegoat and worked at Katahdin Lodge until they died and left most of it to me as payment for a lifetime of hard work, or I had to forget that I had ever become a Maine Guide.

I have often thought about what it would have entailed for me to bring a wider range of paying guests to Katahdin Lodge, which includes campers, hikers, nature photographers, cross country skiers, etc., but it was no use for me to think about that because Fin and Marty would never integrate non-hunting guide services into their business. They couldn't stand the company of people who were into any other outdoors activities except for hunting, they didn't like a lot of their paying hunters either, and those two were far too gruff and vulgar for the tastes of any paying guests except men and women who were in a hunting party frame of mind.

If my aunt and uncle had treated me fairly and allowed me to add other outdoors activities services to the Lodge’s hunting business, then I’d probably still be working at Katahdin Lodge during certain seasons and be financially secure and much healthier, Fin and Marty would have retired from that business in much better financial shape then they did, and the businesses that supplied the Lodge and its guests with what they needed to have great outdoors experiences up there would be a lot better off financially, too (from what I see on the Internet about Patten, Maine, the economy there is hurting).

I am a photographer, a writer, a tent camper who can cook good meals over open fires, a hunting guide who can also show mountain bikers, hikers, ATVers, snowmobile riders, bird watchers, cross country skiers, etc. a fun, healthy and safe time in the outdoors. During the past four decades, I have thought all of this through. I have even planed out things for the Lodge like various types of trails in the miles and miles of woods directly behind the Lodge, star gazer’s huts, a social hall, a movie theater with super comfortable sofas and chairs, space to sell Maine made crafts, trucks to take wheelchair bound clients hunting or out for wildlife photography, and a chalk board in the Lodge where all our guests would write down where they were going to out in the woods that day so that we could know where to look for them if they didn’t make it out of the woods safely that night.

Another part of the problem which kept me from bringing those other services into the Lodge’s business was that Marty had taken tight control of everything about the Lodge’s business but the outdoors work, and Fin needed complete control of that. They would never have allowed me to run a non-hunting part of the business, even though that would have brought in many more paying guests at the Lodge.

Even though I was a trained photographer in the Army, Fin and Marty never acknowledged that set of skills and natural talents, which I posses. In fact, one time when I was again working at the Lodge, during 1977, and a hunter at the Lodge asked me if I ever considered going into medical photography, Fin scoffed, sneered, and rudely said, "Who him, he ain’t smart enough."

My Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha took all of those great opportunities for me to be a lifelong Professional Maine Hunting and Fishing and Photography and Camping and Other Outdoors Adventures Guide from me, and my family, just because they wanted to.

At one point in time, Finley had written into his will that I was to receive two-thirds of his estate. To receive that inheritance, I would have had to become Fin and Marty’s spineless puppet, and that would have crushed my self respect and eventually all respect from anyone who knew me - especially any women who shared an intimate loved with me.

As an eighteen to nineteen-year-old kid working at Katahdin Lodge, I was very vulnerable and impressionable. My Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha knew me well and all of my strengths and my vulnerabilities, so they took complete advantage of my vulnerabilities to control, cheat and mistreat me. I fully realized this when I passed the age that they were when I worked for them, and I realized how well I know some young relatives of mine and their strengths and weaknesses.

When my close relatives lied about my well proven outdoorsman's abilities by telling people more or less that I was a numbed brained incompetent as a bear hunting guide, and then they cheated me out of most of the money and the respect that I had earned as their young, enthusiastic employee, and on top of that, they had verbally and emotionally abused me to the point that my very soul was battered to bits and my mind was too dazed and confused to be able to figure out how to heal myself, it felt as if I had been punished by my family and our society for not being the contributing, hard working member of society that I was.

After that heavy dose of demoralizing reality, I could not go on with my life as if none of that happened. I didn’t know how to, and that is one of my weaknesses. I wish that I was stronger in that way, but my strengths as a young man only included family loyalty, not the ability to fight with my family when they do me wrong. Some people will say that it is just too bad for me and try to walk all over me as my aunt and uncle had, but I tell you this, I have thrashed Finley and Martha Clarke severely - with the truth. I explain that in detail a little further down on this web page.

I have always believed that family members are all supposed to be loving, nurturing, good and fair to each other - unfortunately Fin and Marty treated me the exact opposite of that. No one else in my family ever said anything about this to Fin and Marty or to me. I know Fin was accepted by my family as a hardheaded, self-centered quasi-bully, but they didn’t have to allow him to do what he did to me when I was at such a young, inexperienced age. My reaction to that was to grow angry and resentful towards most of my family. I trusted no one. That destroyed my natural sense of family. It felt as if I had lost my family. I have stayed loyal to them, though. There were chances for me to sue Fin and Marty, which would have made a lot of trouble in my family because Fin and Marty would have said some mean things to my parents and others, and that might have pushed me to the point of raining brutal violence down upon my Uncle Finley. But I chose not to pursue my legal rights due to my family loyalty.

Fin and Marty took from me almost all that I have earned from them along with opportunities for a healthy life that had to include me being able to sometimes work in the woods of Northern Maine (a great expanse of woods that I still love to this day) guiding paying clients on outdoors adventures, and they robbed me of much more that I have a right to seek recompense for. They took the great times that I should have had sharing Northern Maine’s woods and wildlife, along with the memorable companionship of the finest kind'a Mainers, whom I was friends with up theyah' (the word "there" spoken in a Maine accent), and sharing all of that with the rest of my family. If I had been able to work at the Lodge for the bulk of my life, as Finley had desired, and I had considered doing so before the bullshit he and Marty piled on me got too deep, and we could have had my family members come up there and be guided by me on some fantastic Maine Outdoors Adventures, it could have made a huge difference in my life. This has all been a debilitating loss to me - for four fucking decades.

By the time that I entered the U.S. Army in November of 1969, I had become a young man whom I was comfortable with being, who I enjoyed being, who I was proud to be, a gregarious guy who possessed some useful abilities and marketable skills that are just right for a market that I love to work in. But my family had made it almost impossible for me to be him.

When I was in the Army, I was fortunate not to be sent to Vietnam, but my military experiences were way out of the ordinary. You will have to read about that to understand.

As a result of all this, after I was discharged from the Army I lived my life out on the fringes of my family and society as a rather uncommunicative, unproductive, depressed and lonely man for a long time. It was a cold, empty hearted way to exist.I am still more that way than not, and life would be much worse for me today if it wasn’t for the computer programs and the Internet that allow me to produce the stories and the web sites that I work on almost everyday.

Finley and Martha Clarke were both still alive when I first wrote this, but Fin has died. They denied owing wages to me, and they lacked appreciation for all that I did for them. They influenced some people to believe that I’m lying about all of this. Martha Clarke still maintains and expands on those falsehoods. It is time for me to clear my name and to be fully compensated. I want my back pay and the respect that I earned from Martha Clarke. I will pursue this as best I can till after Martha dies and the Clarke estate is settled.

This set of blog postings was created as a PowerPoint Presentation which I had sent printed copies of to Fin and Marty in around the year 2002. I never heard from them about it.

When this was first written for a PowerPoint Presentation, that I made, my Uncle Finley was alive, but he died on April 25, 2006. My nephew is friends with one of Marty’s great nephews, and the information about my uncle’s death came to me through that channel. No one in Finley’s family has ever been notified of his death by Martha Clarke.

I read Finley’s obituary in the Bangor Daily News. There was no mention of anyone in Finley’s biological family in it. But there is plenty about Marty’s family in it. Her family were generally sort of afraid of Finley, and they usually timed their infrequent visits to see Marty in Maine to occur when Finley was not there. Many of them live very near me, and I know that through the years Finley rarely, if ever, came around to visit them when he traveled in this area. He did visit some buddies of his around here at times but not hardly his in-laws. Finley never had much of anything to do with his in-laws.

Really though, as I think all this through, and I rehash about a talk that I had with my cousin who was probably the last one in my family to go visit Fin and Marty, and I read that obituary, and I do know from other sources that Marty set it all up so that she got everything for herself, which she and Fin had worked for, and then eventually for her family, I see now more than ever that it was mostly Marty’s greed that split our family up from Finley forever, at least on this good earth. I simply can’t understand how in-the-hell Martha Clarke could turn her back on my family after having been so close to us from the time that she was born till a few years after she moved to Maine in 1965. It ain’t Maine, it’s all the money that she and Finley were making when they ran their very own profitable business, Katahdin Lodge and Camps, along with Martha's desire to have Finley more for herself than anyone else.

Finley had the Lodge in his name, and when I was there in 1977 Finley and I rode down to the bank in Patten to deliver the final payment on the Lodge. But afterwards all the properties that they owned ended up in both their names. Which would be fine with me if Martha was willing to share what they had together with both our families after her death; but she made damned sure that that did not happen.

Let's face it, Fin and Marty had sent me out into the vast Maine woods to guide their paying hunters after a day or more of telling them that I was a numbed-brained incompetent not worth the food I ate at the Lodge, this means that those two ignoramuses were either lying about my proven abilities as a woodsman or blatantly risking those hunter's safety, plus mine and anyone else around me. When I was working at Katahdin Lodge, there was ample opportunity for me to have caused a deadly hunting or driving accident. One serious mistake on my part could have cost Fin and Marty everything. Nothing like that ever happened.

A question that I asked myself a long time before I began writing out this story is, "What the hell difference will it make to anyone else, is there any redeeming social value to it?"

There is something about my story that is important for other people. It exposes in depth some of the effects of verbal and emotional abuse. Those other people will understand the damage that it was doing to me at the time it was happening and what the life long residual effects from it is. This is a good case study about that type of abuse. It can help both other abused individuals and their abusers to understand better exactly what is going on in their lives. I figure that some abusive individuals have no idea what goes on in the minds of their victims; maybe I can persuade them to think about how serious what they are doing is and how close they are at times to having very violent things happen to them in retaliation. Victims of their abuse can take solace in knowing that they are not alone, when they read this story of mine.

I am bound and determined to write out the wild and fun parts of my Northern Maine Adventures. I also feel a deep need to write about the ‘woodsy’ stuff that I learned up there in the Great North Woods while working as a Maine Guide. In order for me to write about those good things that I have lived long enough to be able to write about, I am saddled with the task of writing about the bad things that I have survived long enough to be able to write about. If I wasn’t sure how important it is for some survivors of verbal and emotional abuse to tell the world about their bad experiences in depth, I would only be writing about the outdoorsman’s and maturing teenage kid’s part of the story.

Some people will ask why I think that this story is so very important that I am writing it all out such a long time after it happened.

First off, my aunt and uncle worked my psyche over so thoroughly that the resulting damage to my human spirit has never healed.

The next part of the answer is that after the damage was done, I spent time as a confused, depressed young man who had lost his sense of family and of self, and I also lost most of my emotional connections to society in general. Those terrible times were damaging in themselves. That prolonged and added to the damage done.

Too many people falsely believe that I had to have been the one who screwed up my career as a professional outdoorsman by not working hard enough for my aunt and uncle or by not being able to do the job. Fin and Marty have all the money and power, and I am a very low income and nearly powerless man. Americans always seem to respect the money and power the most and to move towards it when choosing sides in any debate about the facts of any matter. Some people in my life will never let me forget those falsehoods that they believe in, it still pops up at times during arguments or quasi-civil discussions. I need to set the record straight about who screwed up what, whether I get my back pay and respect from Martha Clarke or not.

I refuse to allow my aunt’s and uncle’s and other relative’s false version of what happened when I was living and working at Katahdin Lodge to be part of the legacy that I will leave to my younger relatives, and to the history of my family, when I die. This future factor is enough by itself to make me write out this story and paste it all over the Internet.

People tell me to remember the good and forget the bad; this is unrealistic; the human mind doesn’t work like that. The reason they say forget about it is because they view it as strictly my unfortunate loss, not theirs or anyone else’s.

It isn’t that way though, it has been and continues to be a great loss to my family, friends, female companions and society as a whole. I am developing this web site by myself. I took one basic Computer 101 class at Dundalk Community College, which is the only training in computer skills that I have. Have you seen my other web sites which are linked to this one at the top left of the page? I have great photographs and well written stories on them. I have a lot to contribute to this world of ours. I need to heal more because I need to give more. I have never wanted a free ride in life, I simply want what I have earned. I can do a lot more of what I do well should I finally receive what I’ve earned.

I need to do more of this kind of work than what I can do at this point in time, for my own good and for my family’s good. And I want to do all that I can for the benefit of society, no matter how limited my working abilities are because of my disabilities. To do all that I am capable of despite my physical disabilities, I need to heal as much of my damaged psyche as I can. That damage could be healed substantially if I were to finally receive the admission of the facts that is due to me from Martha Clarke. She may never give me any respect, but the truth leads to respect for me from others. The healing which would come from people’s new found respect for me would allow me to overcome my depression to some degree. Then I’d be able to handle more of life in general, to do more photography and writing, and to be a fully respected member of my family again.

These web sites, and other things which I have posted on Internet, prove exactly who I am. The problem is that very few people who know me actually know who I truly am. And many of them who know me better than most people do are so used to believing that I’m the person who failed in Maine that they don’t want to read what I have written.

When I drive down here in Maryland during a snow storm I never get stuck; that is because of driving skills which were taught to me by my uncle and a few lifelong Mainers, when I worked at Katahdin Lodge, in 1968-69. When I am out in the woods at night I absolutely love it out there, because I learned to love it and not fear the dark forest, when I was a bear hunting guide, in 1968-69. Those are two examples of the good that I still carry in me from those days.

When I tell some people about the psyche battering, bad experiences from my days as a bear hunting guide that still haunt me and still have a depressing effect on me, they say that it was a long time ago and that I should forget it and move on.

I don’t want that bad shit to still haunt me. If that crap wasn’t still a depressing force in my life, I’d be writing this all out as a fun, fantastic and totally wonderful adventure story. Now that would make a great book and a movie for me to make a small fortune off of. The snowmobile scenes would be the best ever seen on the silver screen. And there’s a real life car chase scene for the movie too, plus other wild driving bits. That depressing bad crap has to be dealt with in my writings too, it’s the only way for me to ever move past it.

For many people, the only tangible part of the answer to the question of why I am writing about this decades later is that I am owed money - a monetary debt does not simply fade away or disappear. Some people just don’t care about how anyone else feels inside. The statute of limitations has past for me to collect this debt through a court of law, but that debt still remains.

I tried to open up a healing dialogue between my aunt and uncle and I in 2001 or 2002, when I sent them printed copies of three benign stories that I have written about my time at Katahdin Lodge. I had hoped that those stories would remind them of who I truly am, and get them to think things over and at least have some small degree of family contact with myself and our relatives on Finley’s side of the family. One story is about the day I helped an old woman who lived six miles north of the Lodge to deal with her home burning to the ground. The second story is about the time that a Washington, DC rocket scientist almost shot my head off when he lost his cool at a bear bait one night. The third is about the first time I went into the small Town of Patten with some other teenagers and had a real fun time meeting girls and almost seeing a guy get his head shot off by a jealous husband. When Fin and Marty refused to acknowledge the things in those true tales that I had done while working for them, it was as if they had done all of the hurtful, demoralizing, depressing things - that are detailed on this web site - to me all over again.

I need to contact as many people as I can who were witness to what my life was like in Patten, Maine, so that they can read what I say about it and verify or deny it. It is the only way to make sure that this story is set straight in the minds of many other people. The are plenty of people in my life, or who were in my life, who believe that it was my fought that things did not work out between my aunt and uncle and I. One or more of those individuals has even gone so far as to relate to me thoroughly false information about my life at Katahdin Lodge. I have the natural born right to clear my name of all falsehoods and to leave the true story of my life behind me, when I move on to the other side of my soul's destiny.

The facts that Fin and Marty publicly humiliated me many, many times and that they have always spread self-serving misinformation about my hard, dangerous work and other accomplishments at their business, to various people, gives me an inalienable right to do the same thing with the whole truth about all this. Unfortunately for those two fools, their ignorant, arrogant, public verbal assaults, insults and outright lies against me were my original inspiration to begin producing fair, intelligent, well thought out, factual written documents detailing my side of the story in ways that make them as available as they could possibly be to anyone in the public.

Ever since I lived in Maine I have often told stories about the wild and wonderful aspects of the adventures that I experienced there to my family members, friends, and acquaintances. Numerous times, I have held the rapt attention of many fine folks who loved listening to me tell my stories about Maine. It always ends with this question, "Why in the world aren’t you still up there?" Then I have to bum everyone out with the answer that my aunt and uncle were very emotionally cruel to me and would neither pay me the money nor respect which I had earned from them.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

My Efforts To Communicate With Finley and Martha Clarke

2006-12-11T14:44:00.000-05:00

The first 13 postings on this blog are based on a 13 slide PowerPoint Presentation, which I had put together back around the year 2002.

All of the blog posts on this web site explain a lot about my transformation as a kid, who was mostly a Rock n’ Roll, Blues, and Rhythm n' Blues fan, from the suburbs of Baltimore, who became a Maine Bear Hunting Guide. They also tell exactly how I was treated by my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley K. Clarke, who owned the hunting lodge where I worked as a Registered Maine Guide, Katahdin Lodge and Camps, in Patten, Maine. The important thing here is that I sent my Aunt Marty and Uncle Finley a printout of the PowerPoint Presentation, but they never responded.

Most of the photos on this web site are from that PowerPoint Presentation, but I have rewritten and added text to the slides, which are now the individual blog posts on here. Though I have rewritten it to a small degree, the basic information and message was already in them when they were sent out as printouts to my aunt and uncle up in Maine and also to a whole bunch of people who live in and around the area of Patten, Maine.

But first I had sent them all--Fin and Marty and many Patten Maine residents--copies of several stories about that time in Maine which I had written first. They are The House Fire, The Day That I Fell In Love With Patten Maine, and The Rocket Scientist. Those are three tales that I thought would remind them of exactly what I had done up there as teenage kid from Dundalk, Maryland and a bear hunting guide and how the history of it truly was. As opposed to my aunt and uncle’s twisted, self serving, self righteous version of how it was, which I have had to try to live with ever since the 1970s. If you haven’t read any of my short stories yet, read some of them to see what I’m talking about.

A year or two after writing my first stories about my Maine adventures and sending them to Fin and Marty, I wrote Then They Own You (published on The Daily Me as Katahdin Lodge 1979) and then sent a copy of that story to them, and to a bunch of Patten Mainers too. That story tells how my relationship with Fin and Marty came to a near murderous halt.

Because of Fin and Marty's refusal to face the facts and admit the truths in my written works about my times with them as their nephew and hard working employee, I do not know whether or not that they ever opened any of those mailed stories to them. But by me sending out all of those copies of all of those written works to the local Patten, Maine area barber shops, beauty parlors, the delicatessen, pizza shop, a bunch of post office box numbers in the Patten Post Office, to various hunting lodges, and also to several of the people who are featured in my stories or to their family members - by doing that I made certain that Fin and Marty would be asked about my written work and how true it is by any number of people whom they could easily come in contact with up there in their part of Maine. I made it so that Fin or Marty could not even go to the bank or grocery store without the possibility of having someone ask them about their lies, deceit, and abusive history of me, and asking them two about my claim that they owe me a lot of money.

Sometime back then, I made a phone call to my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha. My Aunt Martha answered the phone, I told her it was me and she hung right up. There was no use trying to speak with them on the phone again.

In November of 2001, I began to send a series of postcards to my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha.

In 1977, at Katahdin Lodge, I had witnessed my Uncle Finley angrily grabbing a handful of mail, that was addressed to him, he grabbed it out of his wife Martha's hand and threw it right into the trash can. He had no idea who any of it was from. He simply did not want to deal with any of it. That type of angry outburst is a true symptom of the Korean War induced PTSD that Finley suffered, severely, from.

So you see, not only was it extremely unlikely that either Fin or Marty would open up any mail I sent them, due to their refusal to face the facts and admit the truths in my written works about my times with them as their nephew and dedicated employee, Finley would not always open up any regular mail sent to him in envelopes. Consequently, I began to send them postcards.

Copy Of First Postcard Sent On Nov. 15 or 16, 2001

I put my return address on this first postcard, so that it could be sent back to me if it didn’t go through. I sent it expecting that either Fin and Marty still lived at Katahdin Lodge and Camps and still used their old post office box, or the card would be forwarded to them, or it would be returned to me with their forwarding address on it. It must have been forwarded to them, because I never got it back.

It says: You may believe that it was a privilege for me to work a minimum of 9 hours a day 6 days a week for you at Katahdin Lodge—driving thousands of miles over rough roads at high speeds—taking inexperienced bear hunters out into the vast north woods and helping them have an enjoyable and rewarding outdoors adventure without getting anyone shot - and not getting in trouble with the local folks which would have caused you great difficulty in your business. So here is my bill for services rendered: $7,000 for 1968-69 + $2,000 for 1977 + $350.00 bear bonus for 1979. Plus interest. Any amount over $10,000 will settle your account with me. David

The Next Postcard Was Sent On Nov. 28, 2001

This postcard was returned to me. But the Smyrna Mills postal workers surely knew where Fin and Marty had moved to, or they could have found out, because Fin and Marty hadn’t moved too far from the lodge - and the first card did go through. They had moved to 21 Bald Eagle Lane on Shin Pond in Mt. Chase, Maine, which is about 25-30 miles by road from Katahdin Lodge, but up there in the sparsely populated woods of Northern Maine, it’s almost in the same neighborhood.

The way that I figure it is, Fin and/or Marty had made a nasty phone call or visit to the Smyrna Mills Post Office and had bullied them into sending this card back to me with the "Moved, left no address" stamped on this one. Those two self righteous, arrogant, ignorant individuals - my aunt and uncle - could ruin anyone’s day, if they wanted to. I’ve seen it happen to others besides me - and it always turned my stomach. I am sure that a bad, sickening scene was made over my postcards - at the Smyrna Mills Post Office.

It says: When you did not acknowledge my father’s death I felt it within reason to want to slam my fist into your face a few times. He was your friend. (Finley’s brother Nelson had called and left a message on Fin and Marty's answering machine informing of my father's death.)

Not responding to my phone call informing you of my mother’s death was a sad thing for you to do (I had to leave a message on their answering machine). I believe that you did grieve over your sister’s death, privately. Had you come to her funeral I would have allowed you to came and go in peace.

She was your protection. I could not fully pursue my claims against you without causing her to retreat from reality further than she had.

I will continue this quest for good old truth and justice indefinitely. David

I knew that my aunt and uncle would be very angry at me for sending those postcards. They deserved to be dealt with this way. They had angered me to no end, and had hurt and damaged our family more than I had ever imagined anyone could.

I was doing my best to make them so angry that they had to 'come out and fight', and either bring some kind of legal charges or lawsuit against me, or maybe one or both of them would come down here to my home and knock on my door. It may have gotten me shot, but it was well worth the risk. I had no money to go to Maine and bring a lawsuit against them, or to simply knock on their door and demand my money. And that really could have gotten me murdered.

My entire adult life has been lived well below the poverty line. My severe, debilitating depression has been horrendous, and it was partially caused by the way that Fin and Marty did me so much grievous wrong. I have never been in a financially healthy enough - or any other kind of healthy enough - condition to go to Maine for the purpose of pursuing a legal claim for reasonable compensation for all that Finley and Martha Clarke owe to me.

The following scanned in image is the back of a homemade postcard that had the above photo, of me wood splitting at Katahdin Lodge, on the front of the handmade postcard. Unfortunately, before I found out Fin and Marty's new address, I sent this one to the old Smyrna Mills address, even though I knew that it may not ever make it to Fin and Marty. And I left my return address off this one, because I figured that this would give the Smyrna Mills postal workers something talk about, and maybe some gossip about these postcards would reach Fin and Marty. They probably had gotten the first one, but they had been in their new address long enough not to need their forwarding address on file at the Smyrna Mills Post Office. Or maybe Fin and Marty had convinced the Smyrna Mills Post Office personnel not to allow anymore of my postcards or other mail to them to be forwarded.

Later on, I found out what Fin and Marty’s new address is, and I sent another version of this homemade postcard to them at 21 Bald Eagle Lane.

It Says: Remember this? I worked on that woodpile of yours for a minimum of 9 hours a day for 10 days. Plus I had several hours of other things to do at your lodge each day, including going out to track wounded bears. And you never had one good thing to say about any of it.

I was proud to be able to split the better part of 19 cords of wood in 2 weeks. I still love to split wood but I deserve a fair wage for doing it.

GIVE ME MY MONEY!

David

A Postcard Sent On July 16, 2002:

This is a scanned, copy machine copy of a postcard that I sent to Fin and Marty on 7/16/02. I sent them this one postcard, than weeks later sent them over twenty handwritten postcards that all said "YOU OWE ME $27,5OO.15." I sent fifteen of these particular handwritten postcards at one time, so they had to see and read something off of them before the cards went into the trash. I never heard from them about it.

If I am not owed anything by them than why did those two not pursue legal action against me to stop my postcards and stories from coming up there and to defend their good names?

Because they are guilty of all that I say in my stories, on my Internet sites, and said on those postcards.

Now it is just Marty who is alive for me to pursue to get my back pay. She is the one who was the main architect of their cheating me out of my pay anyway. If she was a fair minded person she would have paid me even if Fin had been against it. She didn’t always pay any of Fin’s hunting guides all that we had earned nor all that was promised to us guides by my uncle. I have been told by several reliable sources that Finley’s favorite hunting guide, John Birmingham, had quit because of that; but John is still like the son Fin and Marty never had. If she would not pay us when Fin said to, then she could have paid us when he said not too, because she handled the payroll and the Lodge’s bookkeeping ledgers. Not only that, beginning in the early 1970s, she wouldn’t even let Fin see the friggin’ ledgers.

Unfortunately, for me and my side of the family, Marty has worked things out financially so that she got all that Fin worked for, till she dies, and then somehow she has it so that no one in Finley Clarke’s family gets a thing. No money, no property in Maine, no old photographs of Fin’s, no guns, no hunting knives, no hunting trophies, none of Fin’s personal effects at all, including his war medals. My family gets nothing to remember him by and to share with our offspring and younger relatives who are direct blood relations to this interesting man who was a war hero and a famous Maine Guide.

I believe that John Birmingham and the other people who were Fin and Marty’s long time friends deserve to receive something from the estate when Marty dies. Martha’s family deserves their fair share. I simply want what I earned right now, and also what is fair from the estate for me and my side of the family. Finley became a war hero during the Korean War, which was a long time before he knew anyone in Maine, and I doubt that anyone on Martha’s side of the family feels that they deserve to inherit his military stuff. I believe that Martha Clarke should at least let my family have Finley’s medals and most of his military memorabilia.

But she needs to pay me the money and the respect which I earned while working for her right now!

I was a Registered Maine Guide who tracked wounded bears at night without a gun for the financial gain of her business, after a day of dealing with stenchin’ bear bait and helping paying bear hunters to satisfy their natural needs for a good, safe time in the great outdoors. What more could a person do to earn honest money and the respect that is due to them?

I sent about a dozen more different postcards, than what you see on this web site, to those two self centered, selfish relatives of mine. I told them just what the truth is. I had scanned copies of those cards into my computer, but the computer hard drive that they were on fried and died on me.

Those cards said things like "You are liars and thieves."

If you want Martha Clarke’s opinion on me, those postcards, or my stories and Internet publishings about her and her deceased husband, here’s her phone number and full address:

Martha Clarke
21 Bald Eagle Lane
Mt. Chase, Maine 04765

Ph. 207-528-2131

Feel free to contact her concerning anything on my web sites or in my short stories about My Northern Maine Adventures.

David Robert Crews
2727 Liberty Pkwy
Dundalk, Maryland 21222
ursusdave at yahoo dot com

Due to the facts that: several years ago I sent printed copies of all of my Maine stories to my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley and also to many local Patten area Mainers; and later on I emailed the stories to many folks all over the State of Maine; and then when my stories were published on the Internet I emailed and sent postcards to my aunt and uncle and also to many Patten area Mainers to inform them where my stories were published; some one or more of all of those Maine folks whom I contacted had to run into Fin or Marty now and then, here and there, and must have asked my aunt and uncle about me and the stories that I wrote. Due to those facts they have all had enough time to read and then deny or confirm any truths in them. So far, they haven’t declared to me, or my editors who publish my stories, or anyone else whom I am aware of that any of my stories are complete fictions from my imagination.

Here is a guide to those short stories:

The House Fire is a nice, but scary one (it scarred me when it happened that’s for sure). This one is for people of all ages.

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

The Rocket Scientist is a crazy trip about a genuine Washington, DC Rocket Scientist. I’ll let ya' be surprised by this one.

Bananastien is about young adults testing the limits in 1969 Patten, Me. Part of it gets real wild on the backroads.

Jungle Dirt is something that stands on its own. It was my first attempt at heavily fictionalizing a true story. It is about a Vietnam Veteran’s experience when he went bear hunting in Maine three days after coming home from 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 the Vietnam War. Just about the only fictional parts have to do with changing the names and me making up some descriptive guesses about the Nam Vet’s mother and a small amount was expanded on to the guy’s step father’s description. Boss Hog on the Dukes of Hazard did look exactly like the step father though.

Easiest Way To Carry A Dead Bear is a nutty piece, but it does give a good hunting tip.

An Italian Nice Guy is a 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 (the Italian nice guy) and his family, but they had to be real nice people. Since publishing this story, I have exchanged some emails with Tony's family - Tony has passed away - and they told me to leave the story be just like it is, when I asked if they wanted me to change anything. They said they had great laughs over their memories of the event at every family holiday get together.

My VW Bug Trip To Maine has a bear hunting bit in it, but it’s a hoot, and the rest of it is a wild, funny and happy story. It was about a trip of mine to Maine while I was on leave from the Army just after I had graduated US Army Photo Lab Tech School, and before I went to Okinawa. It goes from Patten, Me. down to Dundalk, Md. and through a whole bunch of interesting experiences.

Driving Northern Mainer Style is a how-to article with a great story in it about the time I nearly 'bought the farm' on a sharp curve way up on the Washburn Road. A road that leads into Caribou, Maine.

Then They Own You (titled "Katahdin Lodge 1979" on The Daily Me) takes place in 1979, when I tried to work for my aunt and uncle in Maine one more time - at their request. They simply had no appreciation for anything that I did for them. They wanted me to work my entire life for them at Katahdin Lodge without receiving a salary and while they seriously mistreated me. I did have some great times at Katahdin Lodge, but it wasn’t worth the emotional abuse that they heaped on me. Neither my Uncle Finley nor Aunt Martha ever said one good word about the work that I did for them. To this day, they refuse to acknowledge what I did up there, when this suburbanite kid went way up into the North Woods of Maine and became a bear hunting guide who never made one serious mistake while living and working there.

Copyright 2006 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

A Set of Emails Discussing One of My Short Stories About My Maine Adventures

2006-12-11T14:40:00.000-05:00

Here is a set of emails discussing one of my stories about my times as bear hunting guide at Katahdin Lodge and Camps in Patten Maine. My Uncle Finley owned that lodge back when I worked there. The story is titled An Italian Nice Guy, and is published here on Maine Outdoors Today. I wanted to share these following emails with all of my readers, because this is a fantastic thing that has happened for me.

First Email Received:

From: "VINCENT CAPOZZI" emailwithheld@msn.com

To: ursusdave (at) hotmail (dot) com

Subject: Italian hunter

Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:29:24 -0500

I know that story all too well as it was told many times at Holidays at my and my Uncle's house. We all miss Tony as he passed away 15 years ago. My Father was one of those on that trip Arthur(my father), my Uncle Fulvio (Phil) and Tony who was my uncles father-inlaw. Sill makes us laugh hearing how Tony bent his trigger trying to fire his gun. My Cousin and I were only babies when it happened but we heard it growing up when we started shooting. I'm going to pass your webpage on to my uncle so he can read this story and laugh his ass off again hearing someone else tell it.
Vincent Capozzi

My First Email Reply:

From: David Crews ursusdave(at)hotmail(dot)com

To: emailwithheld@msn.com

Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 2:51 PM

Subject: RE: Italian hunter

Holy cow my heart is pounding! I can't wait to forward this email to my editors. But look, ya gotta realize that it is half fictionalized about Tony and his family because I was going on what a nice guy he was and his wife would probly be like. The big worry is about her working in the business--but she had to be a great partner in his life. That part about her not cooking worth a crap might make her be a waitin there in heaven to give me a piece of her mind -- that is in there to say that she wasn't perfect but Tony loved her unconditionally. I can see there ain't no anger from ya but I have always had concerns about not making it clear by somehow categorizing the story as fictionalized. I wouldn't mind it if someone in your family could write a bit about what they were actually like. But then it may not matter -- it's all about telling a good story -- I mean shoot man it's a hunting story and that leaves room for real tall tales. I'm a struggling writer and don't know all that is right to do here. I used the fiction to paint a picture of how Tony and his hunting partners were the finest kinda folks and to show how well hunting guides sometimes get to know their clients and how well we hunters and guides get along when we all have common sense and good attitudes. As you can see by the story, they were great to spend a week with. That part about the chipmunk is 100% true, and as a 19 year old kid turning into a mature young man it was a wonderful thing to witness. The whole crew at the lodge felt the same way. This story is not in its final edit, it will be rewritten when I get some more writing experience and hopefully publish a book on my adventures in Maine.Two important questions:

How did you find the story?

Are there any photos from that 1969 hunting trip that could be copied? Good grief Vince, I'm sorta shakin inside.

You contacted me when I really needed this.

THANK YOU.

Vince’s Second Email To Me:

From: "VINCENT CAPOZZI" emailwithheld@msn.com

To: "David Crews"

ursusdave(at)hotmail(dot)com

Subject: Re: Italian hunter

Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:14:42 -0500

My father and I were watching a hunting show on ESPN and got to talking about that trip and how your Uncle drove those roads up there. He remembered one night they were out in his Rover and broke a rear spring in it, Finley pulled over and had them all get out and help him find all the pieces. The broken spring didn't slow him down on the road one bit. My father and uncle thought that was hilarous. So I told him that I'd look online and see if the camp or Finley was mentioned anyplace, as for photos I'll ask my uncle if he has any. Its possible he does he always takes photos where ever he goes. I'll let you know. Vinnie.

My Second Email Reply:

From: David Crews ursusdave(at)hotmail(dot)com

To: emailwithheld@msn.com

Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 1:56 PM

Subject: Re: Italian hunter

When you get together with any of Tony's closest family members please don't forget that I am open for correction on anything I have written about him and that I was only doing my best to show what kind of a nice guy he was and how his family must had been very loving. I have always felt great trepidation saying that his wife couldn't cook, I grew up in a family of good cookin women and know how well most Italian women cook, so it has to be understood that this was put in there to show that I believed Tony and his wife were great partners in life and shared unconditional love. If there are any of Tony's children, grandkids or cousins or anyone who can write a little about him I'd enjoy hearing from them. And always wear hearing protection when you go shooting, my friggin' ears are ringin' loud today and that's from life long exposure to loud noises like target shooting without earguards. Thanks.

Vince’s Third Email To Me:

From: "VINCENT CAPOZZI" emailwithheld@msn.com

To: "David Crews"

ursusdave(at)hotmail(dot)com

Subject: Re: Italian hunter

Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 19:49:22 -0400

How's it going Dave, sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. My Uncle was here this weekend and got a chance to read your story about Tony, he enjoyed it a lot and it was a lot closer to the truth than anyone wants to admit especially about Tony's wife (truth be told she could never cook but he would never say it to her face). I'm going to send it to my Cousin in California, I'm sure he would like reading about his Grandpa. Dave don't worry about offending anyone on this end, the story is mostly true anyway and we think its fitting way to remember him.

My final thoughts to you on this set of emails:

It is easy to see how much these emails mean to me as a writer and a person with some fond memories of living in Maine.

Now and then, over the past three decades, I have had and still get this vague image of me sitting at the long wooden table in Katahdin Lodge’s dining room, and there are several bear hunters sitting there around me talking and laughing with me; Tony is walking out the door after just leaving from laughing it up with our little group of happy guys sitting at the table; Tony and one of his hunting buddies had just had a bit of a comical verbal sparing match about the good and maybe not so good personal traits of Tony’s wife, whom the hunting buddy was maybe related to in some way; the hunting buddy leans sideways in his chair and closer in towards me, kinda clandestine like, grins, and says to me, "Don’t tell Tony I said this, but his wife can’t cook worth a damn." Then laughter re-erupts again. But Tony never heard the remark or knew why he had heard the laughter erupt again back behind him inside of the Lodge’s dining room, so he was never hurt by the remark about his wife’s cooking. I just can’t remember it clearly enough to say that it definitely did happen, but judging by the last email from Vinnie, it probably did.

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

Some Say My Stories About My Maine Adventures Are Full Of Lies

2006-12-11T14:35:00.000-05:00

Here is a Mainer man named Thurlow Harper's comment on the blog posting "I Need Legal Advice and A Lawyer For A Probate Situation In Penobscot County Maine" on this blog site:

I know Marty and Finley Clark. I also know about your past history with them. Finley Clark was a hard man, and if you worked hard, you would be rewarded, however if you did not work hard then you were also rewarded in a different way, like not earning the respect of Finley. You got paid what you were worth. I am from Maine, and I am the Son in Law of Richard Libby who was a Master Maine Guide for Finley for years back in the 70's at Katahdin Lodge in Mount Chase Maine. You may want to think about making your own life from your articles, and not focusing on a lost cause like the one you are trying to pursue. The reason I say that is this. When you were up here in Maine working for them, you were taken care of. You were fed, and had a place to sleep etc. You had no bills to pay while you were here, and you were not told that you would be getting paid for what you did for work. You assumed that you were owed something for what you did. That was a long time ago. We are talking in excess of 30 years. Grow up and get over it. You need to move on with your life. If Marty and Finley Clark owed you, then you would have gotten paid in full!

You need to move on with your life and not live in the past. It will eat you alive.

Sincerely, Thurlow Harper

My blunt and reasonable response to this comment could be:

Fuck you!

Your comment is chock-full of some of the worst stinkin bullshit that I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing.

But I am working and fighting for my life here. So I must fully defend myself. And you, Thurlow Harper, are far from being alone in believing that bullcrap, in your comment, to be true. That same stream of bullcrap had mucked up the minds of some of my family members and neighbors down here in Maryland years ago. My Aunt Martha created this family wrecking mess, and I am determined to set the record straight about it. I refuse to allow her, and also my Uncle Finley's, continuing lies to go unchallenged. Lies that have continued on after Finley's and then Martha's death, and are the reason why a few people like you conjure up grave misconceptions about me and my times living and working at my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha's Katahdin Lodge and Camps of Patten, Maine.

Martha grew up next door to Finley and my mother, who was Fin’s sister, in the small town of Sparrows Point, Maryland, which was a tight-knit community. My father grew up in that small, tight-knit American town too. Then my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my parents, two sisters and I all lived within 5 miles of each other. And up until 1965, when Fin and Marty moved to Maine, when I was 15-years-old, I grew up seeing Fin and Marty at every one of our loving, heart warming and wonderful American holiday family celebrations; they all also came to my and my two sisters’ and my parents birthday parties; and my parents, sisters and I and Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha visited each others homes quite often on anydays. Martha and my mother were like sisters, and Fin and my father were best friends, until Martha’s personal greed came between my closest family members and I and our beloved Finley and Martha.

It is an ancient, well-known fact that family often wants other family members to work for them for nearly nothing. That doesn’t make it right. I fully deserve every cent that I intend to collect from Martha’s estate. All that I am after is what my rightful portion of Martha’s estate is.

Thurlow Harper, your comment wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that both Richard and Barbara Libby are to each receive three percent of Martha Clarke’s estate would it? It is an estate that is worth multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. You said that Richard is your father-in-law, and I think that Barbara is your mother-in-law, right?

I do remember that Richard Libby had married a very good Maine woman, and he loved and adored his wife and daughter dearly. I only remember Richard and his wife having one child, in 1977-79. I also recall the painful knowledge that Richard’s sweet and beautiful young daughter was going deaf, and how the family was preparing for it. When you work with a man as closely as I had with Dick Libby, you get to know pretty well how he feels about his family. I can tell you that he has a mighty good, loving wife and daughter, and they have an equally good, loving husband and father. But you already know that.

You never wrote anything in your comment to the effect that your father-in-law, Richard Libby, said I did not work hard enough for Finley. Your father-in-law Richard knows full well what I did at Katahdin Lodge. So where’s a quote from him?

I would be sorely disappointed in Richard if he did say anything to the contrary of anything I have written and published about the times that he and I worked together at the Lodge. Richard was one of the best work partners I ever had. We had a lotta good laughs together, as we got the job done right and on fairly equal terms. Even though he was much, much more qualified than I as a woodsman; in fact there are no better Maine woodsmen than he is. But I never laid back at all and expected him, or any other Maine guide who I worked with, to carry any of my fair share of the work weight; not even when tracking wounded bears at night without any firearms. I sometimes tracked wounded bears and found dead bears at night by myself. I did my share of all of the work at Katahdin Lodge. Whenever I was at the Lodge, I did all of the lawn mowing and trimming of the Lodge’s very large yard -- work which Richard, and all the other guides I worked with, fully appreciated. They all hated mowing it. In balance, at the end of a hard day’s work, your father-in-law Dick Libby would often do something like taking the bait bucket out of my hand to go in to check that last bear bait of the day by himself. I sure as hell did my equal share of the work whenever we were using shovels, hammers or any other tools on a job together. I defy anyone to look me in my eye and say otherwise.

If Richard is concerned that I may take some of what is his and Barbara’s rightful share of Martha Clarke’s estate, he may be inclined to sit in the witness box of a court of law and declare that what your comment says is true, and what I write about my times in Maine is not true, but he will never be able to look me in my eye as he does so. Richard Libby worked too long, hard and honestly for the good life up in the Great North Woods that he has today, that and knowing him as personally as I do influences me to seriously doubt that he would perjure himself in court or be able to stand seeing it reflected back at him from another person’s eyes -- most especially the eyes of his wife and your wife, Richard’s daughter.

Thurlow, I don’t know who-the-hell you think you are, but you are full of foul fecal matter, i.e. Fin and Marty's bullshit. And it is the ever-expanding pressure from that flow of offensive crap that has continuously pressed me on to make certain that my true articles/stories about my times living with and working for my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha Clarke are not mucked up with, and smothered by, a bunch of other people’s lousy lies -- like the ones that you have written out in your comment.

I cannot allow the lies in your comment to go unopposed. I cannot counter them with a mere bit of angry language against you. Your comment represents the foul essence of the evil misinformation that Finley and Martha Clarke wished the world to believe about me for eternity. It has caused me far too much pain and grief during my lifetime. I refuse to allow it to be part of my heritage to my younger relatives. This is not about “grow up and get over it.” This is no more a case of me living in the past than they are at the Patten Lumberman’s Museum. The Lumberman’s Museum tells of the history that was good and bad for Maine lumberjacks. It also educates people on how the Maine workers had to fight large wood harvesting companies for reasonable employees’ rights, honest wages and benefits. But in my case, it is not all in the past. Your comment full of screwed-up bullshit proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt. It is with me today and will live on after me, unless I put a stop to it.

This thing ate up a good part of me a long time ago, when I lost a substantial part of my belief in what it means to be family, when I lost my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha to their greed, arrogance and ignorance, and when I could never be given Fin and Marty’s honest job reference for me to work elsewhere as a professional outdoorsman. I used to think that it was caused by greed for cash, but in the end it turned out that Martha had always wanted Finley from his family for herself. She would not even allow my mother, Finley’s sister, to see and speak to Finley one last time before my mother died.

This is not about what happened “in excess of 30 years” ago. This is about a lifetime of family ties, years of painfully broken family ties, and family members being brutally selfish and cruel to my closest family members and to myself, and the effect it all had on my family and I and is still having on my family and I today and what people will think about me after I have gone over to the other side -- to my death. It is also about a real debt still owed to me, and a person's debt usually remains in effect after they die.

If anyone believes, or says, anything any different from what I have declared to be absolutely true and factual, then I challenge them to come onto the Internet and lay their version out for the entire world to see.

I may not be able to sue my dead Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha for libel or slander, but I sure-as-flyin-fuk can sue a live person for it. But don’t you worry about me suing you, Thurlow me-laddy, you’re under the protection of an old friendship between me and your wife’s daddy.

When Finley and Martha accepted moneys from their paying bear hunters, for a week long hunt at the Lodge, and then Fin sent those bear hunters out into the woods with me as their hunting guide -- quite often I was the only guide leading bear hunters after a wounded bear, and it was usually after dark, and we guides rarely ever carried any firearms with us -- that was complete verification of Finley’s respect for the job I did for him.

Either that or you are saying that Finley cheated those paying hunters out of their money by sending me out with the hunters as their unqualified bear-hunting guide.

And if you wanna say that Finley ever cheated any paying hunters then you are saying that the three top-notch, life-long professional Maine Woodsmen who I worked with at the Lodge, John Birmingham, Gary Glidden, and your father-in-law Dick Libby, are the type of Maine Woodsmen who have also cheated paying hunters out of their money. Are you that ignorant?

You are saying that those three put up with a lot of lazy, inept working attitude, abilities and efforts on my part, because they would have had to take up the slack in my work that you are outright accusing me of. You and a few others have been accusing me of this for far too long. You know frigin-aye-well that none of those three finest kind of Maine Woodsmen would have worked for Finley if he was cheating hunters out of having outstandingly great outdoors adventures in Maine.

Finley needed those three lifelong professional Maine Woodsmen far more than they needed him; they would have quit working at Katahdin Lodge anytime they were expected to 'carry me' in any way, or to cover up for any lack of professional standards in me that you unjustifiably and ignorantly accuse me of having -- professional standards when it comes to hunting safety, hunting successes, and good, fun times up in the Maine Woods. You are also accusing top-notch Maine Guides John, Gary, and Dick of helping Finley to run a shoddy and dangerous outfit in their part of the Maine Woods. Ain’t no way fukin that was ever going to happen.

If I was not qualified to do my assigned tasks out in the woods, then I was a danger to all. You are implying in your comment that I was a danger to all and that Richard Libby was a damned fool for working with me. Ask your father-in-law, my old friend, OK let’s say former friend, Richard, if this is not all as I say it is.

You gotta a lotta nerve there, Thurlow, in saying that you know what went on between Finley and Martha Clarke and I. You weren’t even born yet when most of it happened. You are some nervy ignoramus for saying that as long as I was fed, given a place to sleep, etc then it’s alright with you that I was not paid a salary, and so it should be alright with me too. Is that how you are making it in this world today? Do you work for room and board only?

I had no bills when I worked at the Lodge because I had no money for a down payment on a good motor vehicle; or to fix up into a residence and live in the really cool old one room school house over in Batesville that I was once offered for a measly fifty bucks; fifty dollars which I never had while at the Lodge, in 1968-69. And it was within my right to take my well-earned salary and use it anyway I wanted to.

But Fin and Marty were determined to control everything about my life at Katahdin Lodge. They fully felt that I should “do everything what, when, where and how” they told me to. They also frequently belittled me in front of our paying hunters. Then I was sent out into the woods with a group of our hunters, and I successfully lead those paying hunters on bear hunts -- each and every time. I never lost a hunter, none got hurt, a goodly number got their bear and most had a whole lotta wild and woolly fun with me.

I always follow rules of safety and common sense, and I was a willing learner up in Maine, but I didn’t need to ask or be told by Fin and Marty how to “do everything what, when, where and how” they told me to -- especially with my own money. Good advice from older family is important to follow, but it is not good to have them completely control you.

As Fin once said, in a conversation about the down side of living with a long term dictator in control of your nation as opposed to a democratically elected president controlling a nation in preset, limited numbers of years, “Absolute power corrupts.” But, unfortunately, Fin and Marty wanted absolute power over my life at their lodge; they wanted me to be their lifelong, subservient puppet with their taught rope wrapped around my neck.

When I first worked at the Lodge, in 1968, honest people would have begun to pay me after I had been there for longer than a nice long visit with relatives to help them out some. Then when Fin had a game warden, Ted Hanson, come up and give me a Registered Maine Hunting and Fishing Guide’s License, it was definitely time for a pro-woodsman’s pay to begin coming my way.

When I left the Lodge to enter the Army, in November 1969, Fin and Marty gave me a lump sum of cash that they said would equal what they figured I would have saved up if they had been paying me all along. But it fell quite short of the full pay I had earned. Pay I had not asked for due to me not wanting to create a big rift in our family, because I knew Fin and Marty were not going to peacefully give my full, weekly pay to me. At the time, they were my lifelong close relatives, and I was living with and working for them, so I knew them in ways that you, Thurlow Harper, could not possibly know them. But for some odd reason, you sure enough think you do.

While I was in the Army, in 1969-71, the fresh memories of Fin and Marty’s abuse, along with my maturing as a young soldier, caused me to consider it a great loss of family when I painfully came to the harsh realization that my aunt and uncle had mistreated and cheated me so thoroughly that I could not see ever having anything to do with them again. I did not have any contact with them from the time I was stationed on Okinawa in 1971, until I wrote them a letter in 1977.

Before I went back to work at the Lodge in 1977, when I first worked with my good work partner Dick Libby, I had previously sent Fin and Marty a letter stating that I should come up there for two weeks to help them out, as I and my parents and my maternal grandmother (Fin’s mother) knew they needed me to; that way we could at least mend broken family ties. The deal was if I stayed at the Lodge for longer than two weeks then I was a full time employee entitled to all regular pay and benefits.

After the two weeks was up, I stayed on, worked long, hard hours for Fin and Marty, and those two ungrateful relatives of mine mistreated and cheated me again. And once again I quietly suffered their abuses of me, in order to keep the family together. Plus I never had plane fare outa there.

I left Katahdin Lodge in the fall of 1977 to attend college in southern Maine and eventually left the state after Fin and Marty cheated me out of pay that would have gotten me into college. I was never able to attend college classes that I had signed up for, because of my aunt and uncle not paying me for several months of work at their lodge, as I had expected them to do when I left for college. I did not speak to Fin and Marty again, until they telephoned me in the spring of 1979.

I went back to work at the Lodge in the early summer of 1979, at Fin and Marty’s telephoned request. They promised me many things, including a full salary and benefits. I did receive paychecks, but the benefits never came or were ever coming. That full story is at this link:

http://www.maineoutdoorstoday.com/DavidCrews/stories/then_they_own_you.html

And it has quite a nice set of writings about Richard Libby in it.

I never again spoke to my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha after I left Katahdin Lodge in 1979. And by the end of the 1980s, Fin and Marty had cut off all communications and relations with Fin’s side of our family. I have never known why.

If anyone anywhere knows why my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha severed all contact with Fin's side of our family, I'd like to know why. Please email me: ursusdave at yahoo dot com

Finley was a very favorite uncle of ours; Martha was far more family than just our uncle’s wife to us. Being cut off from contact with them for so many years and then not being allowed to get together to grieve their deaths along with some of the other folks who also loved Finley and Martha Clarke is not something that a person ever quite gets all the way past.

Thurlow, what do you mean by this? “You may want to think about making your own life from your articles, and not focusing on a lost cause like you are trying to pursue.”

Why do you declare my quest to be paid what is owed to me from Martha’s estate to be a lost cause? What do you know about the legalities of it all? You need to reinforce that statement with some hard facts.

And are you making a heart-felt suggestion that I make something out of my articles, like a book or movie, that is very financially and personally rewarding?

That is exactly what I am trying to do. I would like to make it into a book, but I need some help from a good editor to get my punctuation and some other technical aspects slightly corrected. I also need to spruce up my writings a little and put more of my personal humor and some more descriptive and exciting wording into it; but I suffer from severe depression and I am never quite all there in anything I do. Depression that would sure enough have been relieved quite a bit if Finley and Martha had faced the facts and admitted the truth about what I did for them. They began to receive printed copies of my articles/stories at least 5 years before Fin died, and they had to have known about my Internet publishings of those stories for several years before my Uncle Finley passed on to the other side. They had plenty of time to face the facts and admit to the truth in my writings.

Read my postings on my Livejournal blog http://ursusdave.livejournal.com/, and you will see how the basis for an entire movie about my Maine adventures is all laid out. It has as much info and as many ideas for plot and script inclusion as I could think of, so it would have to be edited down and shored up by other members of a movie production team for it to be the superb final product that I have dreamed of ever since I first worked at Katahdin Lodge.

But, if you and others continue to believe and spread Finley and Martha’s vicious lies about me, then who will the rest of the world trust, you or me?

It takes a lot of trust for any financiers to back a movie project.

Or are you saying that I am making my own life up in my articles/stories by weaving my own lies all throughout them?

If so, then, fuk-off, jackass.

My World Wide Web published articles/stories are a realistic portrayal of my adventurous life in Maine. If they are so far from realistic, as you, Finley and Martha and some others declare, then why is it that Fin and Marty Clarke never did one single thing to stop my work from being published?

Nor did they ever write out their own versions.

Nor has anyone else whom I have written about in those World Wide Web published Maine adventures of mine ever written out and published or commented, on the Internet, anything negative about my work.

Fin and Marty were considerably intelligent, worldly, wealthy and powerful individuals. They had what it takes to publicly defend themselves against what you insinuate are articles/stories full of lies about my times in Maine.

They did nothing in their defense due to the fact that they did not have truth on their side to defend them. I tell the basic truth, they did not. They died owing me far more than they could ever repay, and deep down inside themselves they knew it.

Unfortunately, my Uncle Finley Kenneth Clarke never admitted he was wrong or apologized to anyone. My Aunt Martha Louise Clarke was simply a self-serving and deeply devious individual who would never face up to or admit the grievous wrongs that she has committed against our family and me.

Martha did not even mention Finley’s side of the family at all in his obituary. Martha never even let us know that Finley had passed away. No one on Finley’s side of the family received any recognition in Martha’s last will and testament. And she got everything that was Finley’s. That proves it was Martha who manipulated things to turn out as they have, because, after Finley passed away, she was free to do what she felt to be right.

I have these great stories to tell and write, and they are quite well read, received and enjoyed all across the World Wide Web. I had told my stories person to person for around three decades before I finally got to write any out, and then publish some of them on the Internet. Telling them in person has made for some fun times with family, friends, acquaintances and people I have just met, who enjoy listening to my Maine stories. It also gets me many interesting and entertaining personal stories of lives lived by some of those listeners of mine. I love swapping stories, especially around campfires.

Sadly, when I have told enough of the great, adventurous and comical aspects of my experiences in Maine, there often comes a moment when I am asked, “If you like it up in Maine so much, why aren’t you there now?” Then I have to tell of the bad aspects of my times at Finley and Martha Clarke’s Katahdin Lodge.

I tell the whole story because there are other people in this world who need to learn about the abuse I received from Finley and Martha, and how it has affected me for my entire life. Those other people may also have their own personal history of suffering abuses to deal with. Or maybe they are abusers, or potential abusers, and need to know what it is like when someone suffers under their type of maltreatment. I tell what it is like to believe wholeheartedly in your family, to the point of being willing to sacrifice your life for them, and then they mistreat you and cheat you terribly.

Fin verbally and emotionally abused so many people that very few Maine men ever would work for him. This is a true historical fact. It is why the job was open for me in the first place. Then I kept the job because I was good at it and got things done right.

If you wish to see current proof of my life long work ethic, and my natural and learned talents and abilities, then go to katahdinlodge7photos.blogspot.com -- start with reading some of that site then follow my links on that site to all of my other Internet published works and see for yourself. Just keep in mind that I am a 58-year-old man who has been using computers and the Internet for less than 10 years. My only income is a small, monthly check from the Department of Veterans Affairs, because I am not able to work full time. I could just sit around the house and make no efforts to do any kind of work at all. But, instead, I work as hard as I can by using scrapped together, old computers and learning to use them and the Internet, mostly by trial and error, to post my photos, articles and stories all over the World Wide Web. I show my hometown of Dundalk, Maryland at its best, and Northern Maine too.

I must say here, Thurlow Harper, screw you and anyone else who believes that ignorant bullshit in your comment.

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

An Email Telling Me To "Let It Go"

2006-12-10T23:51:00.000-05:00

I received the following email on July 20, 2008, from Jon Cameron, who I have never heard of before. My emailed reply to it shall follow on this blog posting.

Dave, it seems to often these days that we hear someone trying to grab onto a fist-full of money that isn't theirs. You need to drop the whole "they owe me" crap and get on with your life. Maybe you did do a lot of work/help for them but that does not entitle you to their fortune. Remember, they are the ones that started and owned those camps, not you, so I think they should give the rights/profits to whom ever they wish. My Aunt and Uncle owned a very lucrative business and I helped them for years. I would not expect a dime from them after their passing because it was their buisness not mine. If I did recieve something from their estate after they pass-on, I would be greatful for it, but if I didn't, it would not bother me. Nor would I go after anything because it wasn't mine! I don't want to sound mean here, but you should let it go.

Jon

My emailed reply:

I appreciate the email and you trying to help me see things from your point of view, but you are not taking all of the facts into full consideration.

I have never written or said anything to the effect that I am entitled to, or "out to grab", my Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha Clarke's entire fortune. I have publicly acknowledged, on the Internet, that others are most certainly entitled to parts of Martha's estate too. I worked for my Uncle Fin and Aunt Marty as a professional outdoorsman and am entitled to fair monetary compensation for doing so. And since at least 5 years before Finley died, I had been doing my best to make contact with Fin and Marty; first to mend broken family ties, and then to collect the debt they owe to me. They refused to speak to me on the phone, they never replied to my numerous direct mailings to them or ever in any way, shape or form acknowledged anything I had done for them as a professional outdoorsman and bear hunting guide at their Katahdin Lodge. During their lives, they neither thanked me, complimented me nor ever spoke positively about the hard work that I did for them. They had, though, in fact, declared that my written works about my times at Katahdin Lodge are full of lies. But, they never took any legal or personal actions to stop me from publishing my stories on the World Wide Web or sending printed copies of the stories to them and also to many other Patten area Maine residents. They took no actions to stop me because my stories accurately depict my life and adventures at Katahdin Lodge, and Fin and Marty had no real ground to stand on if they had taken legal actions against me. They never called me on the phone or sent me any written correspondence concerning my well written and distributed stories about my life and adventures at Katahdin Lodge. They never wrote out, distributed or published their own versions or rebuttals of the stories either. They were fairly wealthy and powerful, but I am a low income disabled veteran living on a meager, monthly veterans disability pension check and also without any real wealth or power -- except for 'the power of the pen,' and the wealth of my true life stories and Internet abilities. Frankly, I am no match for anyone who has any legitimate reason to stop me from doing anything. I barely survive and maintain a roof over my head from month to month, or day to day at times, and have no monies for paying legal fees or traveling to Maine.

I don't know what you have done for your aunt and uncle's lucrative business, but I performed many days of physically, mentally and emotionally demanding, dangerous, sometimes death defying, oft filthy and stinky, long hours of hard work for my aunt and uncle's lucrative business.

Your email is from a camp "in on the Oxbow" -- as we at Katahdin Lodge used to say -- so you probably know that Maine bear hunting guides routinely track wounded bears at night without a firearm. Did you ever do anything as out of the ordinary as that for your aunt and uncle, as I have done for my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley?

As a resident of Oxbow, Maine, you must know the rough and tumble road of the section of Rt. 11 that lays between Moro Plantation and Masardis quite well and are able to safely drive it at high speeds. Read my story Driving Northern Mainer Style and you will see that on several occasions I was forced by Fin and Marty to drive it while doing between 70 and 100 MPH the entire way. I drove it at absolute top -- right on the very sharp edge of disaster -- speed for the vehicle I was driving. Did you ever risk your life like that for nothing? I challenge you, or anyone else, to go out early some morning and drive from Katahdin Lodge to Caribou in just under an hour, as I was forced to do several times. The exact route and how I drove it is all laid out in my Driving Northern Mainer Style story. Do that and then see if you want to come back and again tell me it's not something I should be paid for. Have you ever risked your life in such a way for your aunt and uncle? Somehow, Fin and Marty profited from me completing those runs on time. It was good for their business. How have you ever, outright, risked your life for the sole financial benefit of others?

The bottom line is that I was a competent, professional outdoorsman who worked for Fin and Marty, and they did not pay me very much of what I earned from them. I am determined to collect what is an honest debt owed to me.

Something that I find very odd today is that though, many times, I drove up and down Rt 11 past the road which leads in to the Oxbow, I never turned off Rt. 11 and went in there to see what was there. Not even on one of my adventurous and exploratory Sunday drives up that way. A few years ago, I found web sites for some very nice and interesting businesses that are located "in on the Oxbow" and saw that I truly missed out on something good. I wish I had gone in there to see the area and to meet some of the people there. What is your history and life like in on the Oxbow?

Jon has not replied to my email.

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

I Need Legal Advice and A Lawyer For A Probate Situation In Penobscot County Maine

2006-12-10T22:20:00.000-05:00

My Aunt Martha Clarke died on February 26, 2008. Martha was married to my mother's brother, Finley. My Uncle Finley K. Clarke passed away on April 26, 2006. Finley and Martha left me and my side of the family out of their substantial estate.

Fin and Marty died owing me money for services rendered to them as a bear hunting guide, at their Katahdin Lodge. They also died leaving behind a lot of lies about me. They left some lies about my family too. Consequently, Fin and Marty caused me severe, personal, emotional trauma, pain and suffering.

They caused my parents severe emotional trauma, pain and suffering too, but my parents passed away years ago. My parents and Fin and Marty were best of friends, up until a short while after my maternal grandmother died in 1980. This is all well explained in amongst my works published on the Internet.

I have until September 3, 2008 to file a claim against Martha Clarke's estate. I have the paper to do so, but am not sure of what I may or may not put in a claim for. I intend to put in a claim for the money owed to me for the work I did for Martha Clarke. I also believe that I should be compensated for the emotional and personal damages, pain and suffering that Martha Clarke has inflicted upon me.

I need legal advice on what to do here. I need an attorney.

My problem in pursuing this matter is that I am a very low income, disabled veteran. I cannot afford any legal fees up front, nor can I travel to Maine and still pay my house rent.

I am neither a lazy nor aimless person and have been doing all the work I can, as a writer and photographer; and much of my work exposes some of the very best of what Northern Maine is all about. It also shows and tells very interesting and entertaining histories of what 1969 era Maine was like. And numerous Northern Mainers have said so, in emails to me.

When I first began to write my Maine stories, I sent printed copies of the first three stories to Fin and Marty. I also sent printed copies of those three stories to many people in and around Patten Maine. The stories are: The House Fire, The Day I Fell In Love With Patten Maine, and The Rocket Scientist. I put links to them here to where they are published on various Maine web sites, in order for you to know how widely accepted and enjoyed my stories are - up in Maine and around the World Wide Web.

Then copies of the very good stories Bananastein, Jungle Dirt, and My VW Bug Trip To Maine all went out to many Northern Mainers.

Unfortunately, my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley refused to acknowledge those writings. Later, I wrote and sent Then They Own You to my aunt and uncle and many others in and around Patten. Then They Own You is about the near murderous end to my times working for and living with Fin and Marty at Katahdin Lodge.

It was several years later, when it all got published on the Internet. Nearly everyone who is in my stories, and their families, all know about my Internet published work.

Internet published stories and articles also include: The Easiest Way to Carry A Dead Bear or My Uncle Finley Couldn't Handle It, The Italian Nice Guy, Emails Exchanged Discussing The Italian Nice Guy, and then I wrote one about Driving Northern Mainer Style. Take a look at my Internet published works, and you will see how much my adventures in Maine mean to me, and what my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley meant to me before they did me such tremendous injustice.

Eventually, I sent post cards to My Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley declaring what they owe to me. They still refused to respond.

The harder I worked at telling the true facts of the situation, the more Fin and Marty steadfastly refused to acknowledge my work, the worst it made me feel. The depression caused by this has been quite a destructive force in my life. I can't understand why my close family treated me this way. I don't know how anyone can treat anyone else this way.

Maybe I am a fool for believing that family is important. Am I?

The destructive effect of my depression has kept me from doing anything about this, until it is almost too late.

If they did not die owing me anything, if my stories are as full of lies as they declared, then why did considerably powerful and wealthy Finley and Martha Clarke not take legal action or write to me or call me on the phone to try to stop me from sending out many printed copies of my stories, from sending them post cards, and from publishing my work about them and me on the World Wide Web?

Because my stories are true, and they did die owing me more than their substantial estate could ever repay and compensate me for.

My email is: ursusdave at yahoo dot com

David Robert Crews Copyright 2008

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

In Case I Am Attacked Or Murdered In Dundalk

2006-12-10T15:01:00.000-05:00

The following information about this post card has been emailed to postal inspectors and the FBI. I have spoken directly to my local postmaster about this situation. I have had telephone conversations with other postal authorities and an FBI agent about this post card, and the story behind it. I may also soon email it to Baltimore County detectives (I was just interrupted, in my final edits of this blog entry, by a phone call from a postal inspector who told me to contact Balto. Co. detectives, because the postal service only investigates threats, and according to their strict legal definition, my post card is harassment. The person or persons who sent the card planned on it not being viewed by authorities as being a direct threat, I am sure. But it is a direct threat against me; read on and you will see why.):

The email:

I have received a threatening post card. A front and back copy of it is attached to this email.

If you look at the message side of the post card, you will see that my address appears to have been written in by a right handed person who is writing left handed. The address and the message on the post card were done by two different hands, and possibly were written by two different people. The card is from Hawaii, but post marked from Boston. These are all ways to disguise whom and where the card came from and when they were in Hawaii, or maybe they never went to Hawaii.

Why would they bother to disguise their handwriting if they do not intend to follow up on their threat?

The same with a post card of Hawaii being mailed from Boston. Is that an attempt to throw investigators, of the post card sender's planned future homicide of me, off their trail?

Did they go to Hawaii at all?

Did they transfer flights in Boston, or did they get someone whom they were in Hawaii with to mail the post card from Boston for them?

If I am murdered, I have no one here to help the Postal Inspectors, FBI, and local Baltimore County homicide detectives with the info of this situation. Of if I suffer a heart attack or stroke from the extreme anxiety I am experiencing. I must have the copies of this post card in an official file.

The confirmation number for the report filed with the Postal Inspectors is: co37852760.

My web site with the background story fully written out, with photos of my times in Maine and scanned copies of post cards I sent to my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley K. Clarke up in Northern Maine, all said to be full of lies by my recently deceased Aunt Martha (she died Feb. 26, 2008, Uncle Finley died Apr. 25, 2006), on it is: http://ursusdave.blogspot.com/

My Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha were well aware that I had published that web site and also many short stories about me working for and living with them at Katahdin Lodge and Camps of Patten, Maine. Fin and Marty claimed that all of my work is full of lies.

Who ever sent me that threatening post card has obviously referenced my numerous published stories and web sites about my times working for my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley Clarke up in Maine -- i.e. "YOU BEAR DUNG" -- and the post card sender has fully believed Martha Clarke's claims that my published works are full of lies. I fully believe that they are seeking revenge against me on behalf of recently deceased Martha Clarke.

If my stories are full of lies, then why didn't my fairly wealthy and powerful Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley try to legally stop me from publishing my stories and also bring law suits against me and my editors too?

Links to all of my published works are on

http://www.ursusdave.blogspot.com/

Thank you.

That is the end of the email.

Now that I have finally begun to seek legal recourse against Martha Clarke's estate, there is a much higher probability that the person, or persons, who sent the post card will be coming after me to do me harm.

This is the only way I have to inform any allies I may have in the Patten Maine area that I need them to think about whom it may be who would want to come and do me harm, as a result of my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley's hardheaded attitudes about not admitting that they had done me wrong. I know that the post card sender, or senders, is/are not anyone whom I worked with at the Lodge, because they're the kind of men who will come right out and say what they want to, if and when they want to. And they know that my many published stories about my times at Katahdin Lodge and in and around Patten are real. I do not even believe that it is anyone from the Patten area who sent the threatening message to me; it is just a small possibility that someone up there may have heard something to help me, or to help the investigators of my potential murder.

I wouldn't be so worried if the post card sender had not tried to disguise their handwriting. This immediately revealed to me their intent to follow up on their threat but not have their handwriting on the card as evidence of whom they are. They have to be "watching" me for a reason, right?

Copyright 2008 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

What Great Wrong Did My Family Do To Finley and Martha Clarke?

2006-12-10T14:57:00.000-05:00

Does anyone anywhere know of any real wrong that my family did to cause my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley Clarke to refuse to have anything to do with us for about the last two decades of Fin and Marty's lives?

What did we do to Finley and Martha?

That is all I want to know.

What was so bad about us that may have rightfully kept my mother from seeing her brother Finley one final time before she died? As she had once requested, via my sister and over the phone, of Martha - my mother's childhood and adult life friend, for nearly five decades - Marty.

Finley and Martha had to have told some of their friends and Martha's family members why.

Just tell me.

My email is: ursusdave at yahoo dot com

Copyright 2008 David Robert Crews

ursusdave
Patten Maine
Katahdin Lodge
David Robert Crews

Possibilities for A Fictionalized Movie Version of My Northern Maine Adventures

2006-12-10T14:10:00.009-05:00

[This is the beginning of a 4 part document about a movie that is centered on my Northern Maine adventures. I have spent hundreds of hours thinking and planning this movie out--during the past 38 years. I also must explain on here just what my life has been like ever since living through those Maine adventures and what my life is like today. This 4-part document is read from the top of this blog on down--from the latest Northern Maine Adventures / The Movie blog post, down through the older ones; just the opposite from how blogs are normally read. I guarantee that this well written document is full of interesting, entertaining and even shocking snippets---all the way through. I do believe that you'll enjoy this. Read on! }

During 1968-69, when I was an 18 to 19 year old kid, I moved from the Dundalk suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland up to my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley Clarke's hunting lodge, Katahdin Lodge and Camps, in Patten, Maine. While at Katahdin Lodge, I became a successful bear hunting guide, and a very happy country girl's delight. I was also horrendously, emotionally abused. I lived and worked at the Lodge for about a year, until the day that I entered the Army, and then went to Ft. Monmouth's US Army Photo Lab Tech School.

While I was living and working at the Lodge, I learned more than I could have during four years of college. And then my experiences in the Army were just about equal to four years of graduate school.

Ever since about three-quarters of the way through those 1968-69 experiences at the Lodge, I have known for certain that the story about my life and adventures up in Northern Maine will make a good movie.

Click here to see a 1969 aerial view of Katahdin Lodge.

Click here to see the 2007 Katahdin Lodge web site.

Please allow me to say here that my writing and photography talents and skills, along with some of my other well-matured, valuable natural and learned talents and skills, will greatly add to the success of this project. My written and photographic work, which is on the Internet, unequivocally displays my current talent and skill at entertaining people and communicating with them. Links to most of my World Wide Web published works will be provided throughout this document, where they each support or enhance particular portions of this movie synopsis.

The basis for everything that you need to create a movie in your own head is contained within this synopsis. Fortunately, I am aware that, in order to please today's demanding movie audiences, the proposed film needs some superbly humorous or perilous plot line or sub plots thrown in. Even though the true story, that spawned the basic idea for this film, is a good and relevant one, it needs some fictionalization and also a solid dose of completely fictional help. Through the years, I have come up with plenty of ideas for using completely made up characters and plot lines or sub plots in this film, and adapting real life events into the story that had nothing to do with me. The final film version requires some creative enrichment, which may come from me or from someone other than myself—like you. So I am offering out, far and wide, an open invitation to all who are film industry pros or anyone who is struggling to be part of the film industry, like me, to join in on this project. Whether you are or are not a film industry person, this synopsis will guide you through an interesting and entertaining experience.

Unfortunately though, I have no idea of how to properly communicate my movie idea to potential producers, directors, or writers. I am a rather reclusive, disabled military veteran barely surviving on a tiny veterans disability pension. There is no one to help me write this any other way than what I am going to. Consequently, if you are a member of the film industry and you are looking for, or are open to, a fantastic new project, then nix all of that bullcrap about how this should be and accept it for what it is—a very well written explanation of a good movie that will be made. I simply prefer to still be alive when it is made.

This movie will be centered on my, wild and woolly, 1968-69 experiences in Northern Maine. I must, though, put into this synopsis enough information about my experiences as a US Army photographer, and a little bit about what my life has been like since 1969, then also add what my life is like today in order for people to understand the full ramifications of my Maine experiences. It is also pertinent that I explain why I am so devastatingly limited in my abilities to market this movie. Therefore, everything within this synopsis is all tied together and is necessary for telling this story and for explaining to you why it is that this film project is still in its infancy. All portions of this document contain some down right interesting and entertaining information. It is one hell of a story. And its time has come.

I guarantee that a well-made movie about my Northern Maine Adventures will be: very entertaining for a wide audience; it will be of some considerable historic value; it will insert a different and interesting slant into the current body of various copyrighted works available about my generation; it will teach people something; it will provide a new voice to help explain the everyday lives of people who grew up in small town USA during the 1960s; the cinematography will be visually stunning at times, visually relaxing at others, beautiful when it should be, anything it needs to be when it needs to be; the writing will be—as some of my old 1960s generation used to say—“right on time”; the plot will be fun filled, dramatic to a necessary degree, emotionally wrenching the few times it has to be, and as action filled as it actually was for me when I lived the story.

This film will frankly, honestly, and, hopefully, helpfully deal with some personal, family, social, etc. issues of the characters in the movie that which numerous audience members will be dealing with in their own lives. Fortunately, most of those characters will also have a lot of fun and adventure throughout the film.

This film has that oft used, usually very effective for audiences, plot thread weaving throughout the movie of an outsider who moves to a very different kind of a place from where he has spent most of his life, and he successfully creates his own personal niche there.

Moviegoers love seeing previously unfilmed locations used as backdrops for, and also as intricate parts of the beautiful fabric of, a new movie. No movie has ever been made about living in the tiny towns up there amongst the vast forests, and the ever-present potato fields, of Northern Maine. And there will be plenty of film footage shot outside of any towns, out on sparsely populated rural roads. Along with lots of deep down in the woods footage, including some scenes of tracking wounded bears at night without any firearms and only having one of those cheap old two D-cell flashlights to see with. Some hunting footage is needed, in order to tell the story effectively. No kills need be portrayed. Just enough bear hunting, and, possibly, it all depends on how everyone working on the project feels about this, a tad bit of gutting and skinning time on film. These bear hunting parts and any normal, everyday hunting guide work doing the gutting and skinning must be directed and photographed tactfully and artfully—some film industry professionals love that kind of a challenge.

An outstanding benefit towards the potential blockbuster success of this film is the fact that there has never been any great snowmobile riding shown in any movie before, and this one has to have it. That cool cinematic action will be far and above the sum total combination of all of the snowsledding scenes you could have possibly ever seen in all of the TV shows and movies that may have already been made with any motorized sled riding in them. Not even the professional snowmobile racing shows on TV go where my well planned out sleddin’ action does. These snowmobile scenes will be something that will thrill and please a very wide audience. Those audience members who have never ridden snowmobiles and/or those who have never seen the kind of hard riding that will be portrayed in the movie will love it. And those audience members who have ridden or ride sleds themselves will love it too—not only because they will be seeing some of their kind of lifestyle on film, they will be lovin’ the restored vintage sleds that we will have to use for the movie. But the snowmobile scenes are, well, frig it, I just must phrase it this way, only the icing on the cake.

This film has real-life, wild and crazy, highly skilled country and backwoods roads driving in it. No Hollywood stuntmen will be able to do most of it; only some lifelong local Mainers up there will be able to do it their way, in their Rockin’ and Rollin’ style, with their right in the groove, safe and smooth, normal for Northern Mainers, daily driving abilities. For reference, see my well-read, and also well liked, stories Driving Northern Mainer Style and Bananastein these have the wild and crazy, but extremely highly skilled aspects of the stunt driving that will be in the movie. For the comical driving scenes, see My VW Bug Trip To Maine.

I did own and ride a 1969 Triumph 250 motorcycle, while up in Maine. And there was a guy working at the Lodge with me who had a Triumph 650, but that motorcycle riding is a small part of my experiences up there. The snowmobile riding is the most important, because it is thrilling and new to audiences. Then comes the true life, very crazy country road and woods road driving, and then a little bit of vintage 1969 Triumph motorcycle footage can be in there too.

In 1973-75, while living in Maryland, I owned a Yamaha 650 and became known as a "trick rider". I would stand up on the seat and do other motorcycle riding tricks. I also sometimes rode hard and fast, but safely—and those better than average motorcycle handling skills of mine could be added to the movie. I did not ride so well yet when I was living in Maine, during 1969, but that is just an example of how I envision the creative potential of this movie.

This is a movie with other challenging creative potential too; I am only telling the facts of the true story here, in this synopsis, but all movies based on true experiences are embellished upon. So any creative offerings from scriptwriters, directors, or actors are fine with me, as long as they only benignly embellish and emphasize the facts of the story or the individual personalities of the movie’s characters.

The movie sound track will include rarely heard, but superb, album cuts from the musical choices of The Rolling Stones, The Animals, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Spencer Davis Group, Them, The Yardbirds, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, The Chambers Brothers (but there is no way that we will use one split second of “Time Has Come Today”, this is not about the same ol’, same ol’), Moby Grape, we will probably use something off of one of John Mayall and the Blues Breakers first three albums, Paul Butterfield’s first two releases, the first two Country Joe and the Fish’s Frisco based and influenced Rock ‘n Roll + R+B albums are good for something to use, and maybe a little West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band thrown into the mix. I also had some of the Doors, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, etc, recordings with me at Katahdin Lodge, in 1969, but 98.7% of what is to used on this soundtrack must be rarely heard, ‘cept by music collectors like me, really good album cuts only.

That one or two percent of non-rare album cut music will be one or two 1969 era Top 40 songs for the drug store lunch counter jukebox, when the main character in this movie looks out onto the everyday life of a small Maine town, from a stool at the lunch counter, on one pleasant summer afternoon, and realizes that the town has so much natural Rock and Roll Soul that every time a good song plays on the jukebox someone walking by outside walks to the beat of the music, which the pedestrians out there could not hear.

When I was living the story, I loved listening to all of the songs that will be used in this movie. And I still listen that music; I have a large collection of it.

The soundtrack will be fantastic.

At the end of this paragraph there is a link to a great set of photographs of my Maine adventures. These photos will greatly aid you in visualizing this movie. Just remember, I know that we are going to be aiming this movie towards a wide audience, so we do not need scenes in it like the photo with the other guide and I (I'm in the green hat) with four dead bears. Freshly killed animals are normal for hunters to see, and for slaughter house workers too, but fast food hambu'ger devouring Americans usually don't wanna' see how their meat gets processed. It is OK with audiences if you shoot people and blow people all to hell in one of your movies, just don't shoot an animal on film. Or maybe we can. This is a decision for members of the film production team to handle. This is the link.

The main character in this movie is an 18 to 19 year old kid from the Dundalk suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. And during one year of working as a bear hunting guide, at his Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha's Katahdin Lodge and Camps in Patten, Maine, that young man learns more than he could have during four years of college.

The nephew's original plans though, for that part of his life, were to join the Merchant Marines, and have fun, excitement and adventure while sailing all around the world. That way neither the US Army nor them jarheaded, Bulldog brained, ground poundin’ US Marines could draft him and send him to Vietnam—a war he would have willingly volunteered to go fight in if he could have seen his potential service there, and possible death, physical and/or emotional injuries, and/or capture by the enemy, as providing any real protection and positive contribution to his country, his family and the Free World.

He never did get to join the Merchant Marines. Nope, he was more or less drafted into service to work for his Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha, better known as Fin and Marty at their hunting lodge in Maine. Fin and Marty desperately needed his help to operate their hunting lodge. He was pressed into working for them, as their virtual slave, until his US Military draft notice came in the mail. So, after about a year of living and working at the Lodge, and being taken full advantage of by his emotionally abusive uncle and thoroughly selfish aunt, he ‘motivated’ on down to the US Army Recruiter’s Office in Bangor and gladly signed up to be an Army photographer. And was sent to Okinawa, thank God not Vietnam.

After about the first three or four months of living and working at the Lodge, he would have left and joined the Merchant Marines, but he had no money to go anywhere. His aunt and uncle never gave him more than ten or fifteen bucks a week for spending cash. The longer that he worked for them, and consequently the more that they owed him in salary, the less willing that he was to piss them off by leaving, because then he knew that they would not pay him what he had earned. Another thing is, if he left before them two wanted him to go, then it would cause a rift in their family, and he was willing to sacrifice anything for the good of his family.

Finley and Martha never had any children, but their nephew believes that they are securely in love, and that they make love often. But he doesn’t know if they had ever discovered what the unfortunate, medical reason was that had prevented them from conceiving a child. And he feels sad for them about it.

The main character becomes very close friends with various peoples of all ages, all along the way. He has close relationships with pretty teenage girls. His teenage adventures are wild and wonderful. He has his share of teenage trials and tribulations, too. He quite comfortably fits right in with the small town social life. He has plenty of friggin’ fun with the older local Mainers and paying bear hunters alike. He enjoys jokes and laughter quite a bit. He learns to play, and thoroughly enjoys playing, a lot of Cribbage. He listens to many expertly spun tall tales told by old Maine woodsmen, likes that better than watching television, and becomes a fairly entertaining storyteller himself.

He loves the great outdoors—in any kind of weather—whether at work and play.

His job at the Lodge requires him to work hard for a minimum of nine hours a day, six days a week; he once worked for two weeks straight all day and into the night; he works as hard as he can, and that is somewhere above the average for most young men his age at the time. He not only works as a bear hunting guide, which requires him to learn and master certain woodsmen’s skills, and where he makes damned good use of his natural born people skills, he also works at the Lodge as a carpenter’s helper, mechanic’s helper, electrician’s helper, plumber’s helper, he splits many cords of firewood, learns how to properly care for a burning wood stove, he shovels a lot of snow and becomes quite proficient at plowing tons of it with a farm tractor, shovels his fair share of dirt, mows acres of lawn, he takes care of the needs of seven hound dogs, one ornery horse and two caged Bobcats; he even makes good friends with one of the Bobcats. He loves the animals, fondly pets and plays with the playful ones and respects the rights of the others who only want to be fed, watered, cleaned up after, and then to be left alone. Those critters never want for anything while he is responsible for them, except to be let loose to run free; but, unfortunately, they would not survive for very long while roaming around where they felt like. He cleans up a lot of dog and cat scat—scrubs the cat crap out of the Bobcat cage while crawling around in there down on his hands and knees. On many a day, he handles tons of stinky, maggot covered bear bait—55 gallon drums full of slaughterhouse leftovers (mostly cow guts and heads) and rotting Beaver carcasses.

A requirement of that profession dictates that a hunting guide must regularly go into the woods at night and—heh-heh-heh—go in unarmed. It is against the law to be in possession of a firearm in the woods after dark, because that would be illegal night hunting. But a wounded bear must be tracked as soon as possible; that task can’t often wait till morning.

The trick is, though, that 99.99% of the time, Wild Maine Black Bears, even wounded ones, always avoid human contact. There are no poisonous snakes up in that section of Maine. No ticks or Chiggers. Only them pesky darn Black Flies, Mosquitoes and No-See-Ums (Midges), and they are only there during their own regular seasons. The most dangerous critter in the North Maine Woods is a cow Moose with a calf. And those are all natural facts that he lived by.

While tracking wounded bears at night, sometimes by himself, he begins to thoroughly enjoy being in the woods after dark. He feels secure in there. It is quiet. Peaceful. Comfortable. With the softness of darkness caressing him. Somehow protecting him. His night vision is a tad bit better than most humans, and this is often evident to all whom he tracks wounded bears at night with. And throughout the rest of his life, he never looses those warm, fuzzy feelings for spending time out in the woods at night.

Believe it or not, it was Fin and Marty’s requisite fast driving over those wild and woolly country roads way up there in sparsely populated Northern Maine that was the most dangerous duty assignment while working for them at Katahdin Lodge. That self serving pair of hunting lodge operators required all of their guides to travel at an average speed of 10 to 20 miles over the speed limit at all times when driving on public roads, so that the guides could get more work done for them. The 18-year-old nephew was taught, and also learned by experience, how to very safely and comfortably drive those crazy country roads up there. Like he was born to do it. And he was.

He also had to master driving four-wheel drive vehicles way back in on old woods roads, where you were on your own for quite awhile if you got stuck or if the truck broke down. His daily driving routes sometimes went through mucky quagmires and even down one skinny little old woods road that was flooded over by a Beaver Pond. He was just tickled pink every time that he got to dangle his arm out the driver’s side window and dip his fingertips into that cool, clear Beaver Pond water while he was casually moseying on through it. No matter what lay ahead of him in the road, he had to finish all of his assigned daily driving routes because he was out bear baiting and/or taking hunters to their bear stands. His highly skilled smooth driving technique on them rough old woods roads provided about as comfortable a ride for him and his passengers as any other motor vehicle operators up there could. Them paying bear hunters were mighty pleased about that. And he himself was deeply satisfied with, and proud of, his rapidly developing driving skills. Yup, yup, he sure enough ‘dug’ it. Dig it?

Various daily combinations of those hard, dirty, often dangerous, and sometimes downright stinkin’ assigned tasks never really bother him very much at all. He never complains about any of it. And enjoys the many physical and mental challenges, which are involved in his work. He is well aware that he is learning and growing. His self-assurance steadily increases with each accomplished task, each job done right. He feels stronger everyday. He rarely fails in anyway to do all that he is told to and in the way that he is instructed to do it. His Uncle Finley knows a lot about on the job safety, and the most efficient ways of doing things, the easiest ways to do a difficult job, and the nephew pays close attention to it all.

He becomes enamored with Wild Northern Maine Black Bears. He relates to them in many ways. He understands them quite well.

He is fascinated by: how intelligent and crafty that Black Bears are; the way that they skillfully, usually silently, move through the forest; the dazzling way that the sunlight glistens off of the tips of their fur as they bolt at the sight of his fast approaching pickup truck—as they quickly get up from sitting there in the middle of a backwoods road, up off of their wide, muscular haunches, and bolt away on all fours, on into the woods—on a beautiful summer day. And he adores the sparkle of life in their eyes. The mere, fleeting glimpse of any bears, and also of any of the other wild animals in Maine, especially them big ol’ Moosies, thrills him to no end.

But he realizes that the hunting business is far better for a natural environment than the likes of the steel mill near where he grew up at in Maryland. That mill had thoroughly polluted the backwaters of the Chesapeake Bay that lay right down the street from his boyhood home. He had swum and fished down the street there till the water became too polluted, cancerous to swim in, and the Snapping Turtles that he loved to catch and release, the fish, crabs, and other aquatic life were mostly either dead or diseased. To his way of seeing the world, the people who lived in Maine had to make a living and a well regulated hunting industry is fair to Mother Nature.

The young guide shows many of the paying hunters at the Lodge great, memorable times in Maine. He has plenty of great experiences and becomes good buddies with most of the hunters.

He does have some serious problems with a few idiots who could afford the cost of a bear hunt, though—the worst problem being when a Washington DC rocket scientist nearly shoots his head off with a hunting rifle.

Somewhere along the line, whilst passing these tests of his young manhood, he comes to understand a truism that sticks with him for the rest of his life. Something quite profound. He realizes that as long as he does his job right and no one whom he is responsible for gets lost in the woods, badly injured or killed, then no doctor, lawyer, gas station owner, factory worker, refuse collection worker or rocket scientist is any better of a person or is more important and worthy than he is. He also realizes that as long as you do what you do to the best of your abilities, then you are as important and worthy as anyone else is, too. In an honest, hard working society, where we are all concerned about each other’s well being—our combined safety, security, health and happiness—we all have the same basic equal rights and responsibilities.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

The newly minted young Registered Maine Hunting and Fishing Guide (but he only guided bear hunters) becomes very close friends with another hunting guide, whom his uncle has hired to work at the Lodge. That guide becomes his mentor. His mentor does get him into a bit of bad situation now and then, but he still stays friends with him. They have wonderful times while driving around together all over the fantastic Maine countryside, God’s Country, when they are out bear baiting and taking care of the hunters. They enjoy each other’s company, immensely so.

That guide’s wife works on the housekeeping staff at the Lodge, and the main character also becomes good friends with her. That guide and his wife, Gary and Cathy Glidden, are each around 28 years old. They are both a little tall, slender in the most healthy of ways, and better than average looking. The guide is a nice enough fellow, but his wife actually is about as nice a person as can be. She is the kind of person who never hurts anyone, in any way. Her constant, sweet smile and the sound of her often lightly laughing, feminine voice sooths and puts the world around her at ease. The guide had been a beer drinkin’ wild man, when he had met his wife. When the couple had met, the husband had instinctively known that the young woman whom he had just met was well worth settling down for, and settling down with. He knew that she was a rare bird, and that he would never find another so fine. In order for him to be able to settle down for her, so that he could settle down with her, and spend the rest of his life with her, he stopped drinking alcohol completely. He never again touched a drop of it. It definitely was one those great love affairs of all times—that we all wish for, for ourselves and for all whom we care about.

The first time that the main character in this movie saw the beautiful, expansive countryside of the Katahdin Valley his very soul expanded, nearly burst with natural joy and felt like it had finally arrived home.

He discovers and covets the absolute most dramatic, stunning view of Mount Katahdin that he ever wants to see—a view he has never found in any of the many, many published professional photographs of the mountain that he has ever seen. He spends the rest of his life wanting to take a superb series of photographs from that spot, at every conceivable time of day, during all four seasons, in any kind of weather when the mountain is visible, with any kind of light shining down upon and bouncing back off of it that the good Lord may provide for our viewing pleasure. But his aunt and uncle have no use for that, so it never happens. Because it was all about, “David, here at Katahdin Lodge we don’t have time for that, we have work to do.” Work that only enriches those two hard headed, self-serving relatives of his.

Every single day, his uncle yells and curses at him. Finley sometimes does that to blame the nephew for what his uncle had done wrong himself. This humiliates the younger man in front of anyone and everyone who may be in the vicinity at the time. He feels like punching a few of his uncle’s teeth out, but he stands there and numbly takes the unreasonable abuse. His aunt and uncle cold-heartedly nickname him, “nummer.”

One time, his uncle gets mad at him and does not speak to him for three days straight, during a busy week when the Lodge is full of paying bear hunters. And it was not the nephew's fought that the incident that had so unjustifiably angered his uncle had happened.

Finley suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, after fighting for a year up on the front lines of the Korean War. He had earned several prestigious combat medals in that war. But he never would have accepted that he had PTSD and deal with it through veterans counseling. PTSD had a lot to do with the way that Finley often became unreasonably angry. This realization comes to the main character nearly twenty years after he had first seen his uncle display the symptoms of the terrible emotional disorder.

The main character is a Vietnam Era Veteran who never went to Vietnam, but who has seen the same type of intense anger, which Finley displays, coming out of his Vietnam combat veteran friends. And that PTSD induced anger has its very own distinct "flavor", ya' might say. A taste of the horrors of war that combat veterans do not consciously choose to share with others, it simply comes out of them that way.

His Uncle Finley worked harder than any man he has ever known. His uncle always adhered to the maxim, “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”

The nephew had developed that same philosophy on his own, when he was growing up—always mowing lawns, shoveling snow off sidewalks, cleaning his bedroom, and even building model cars in accordance with that philosophy. Consequently, the young man was proud to have worked with such a person as his Uncle Finley.

When he and his uncle part ways for good, it is a great, decades long loss for the nephew. To have to not ever again be close to his uncle, whom he had loved, admired, and respected in many ways, was devastating to that very soul of the young man.

His aunt’s abuse is much more subtle than his uncle’s is, but, nonetheless, it is also very devastating to him. The more she and her husband treated him terribly, the worse the emotional pain in his maturing young man’s mind becomes, due to resulting, increasing confusion about what family means.

His Aunt Marty is sly, devious and completely selfish. She cheats him out of his well-earned salary. She too works very hard at times. He respects that. He laughs at most of her humor, even when it is at his expense—though he does that to cover up the painful injuries it inflicts upon his psyche and soul. But he never gets a kick out of her famous propensity for telling dirty jokes; if she had been good to him though, he would have gotten a kick out of that well known aspect of her personality. His Aunt Martha had grown up in the home next to the home where his Uncle Finley and mother had lived for most of their youth. She was like a sister to his mother. His uncle had married the girl next door.

The longer that the nephew works at the Lodge, the worse that the abuses from his aunt and uncle become. But he still wants to leave there with his many months worth of full pay in his pocket, and he does not want to feel responsible for creating a big rift in the family. Had he told Fin and Marty that he was leaving, they would have gone ballistic on him, declared him to be an ungrateful S.O.B. or L.B., and would have told him to get on down the road on his own, that he was not getting paid anything and that he owed them for the food that he had eaten there and the gas that he used while runnin' round with them country girls. So he stays on, and suffers through it all.

The main character had grown up in a tightly knit, extended family. And when he was growing up both of his parent’s families had lived close by, and they all knew each other well. For the first fifteen years of his life, his Uncle Fin and Aunt Marty had lived close to him. Then they moved up to Maine and bought the hunting lodge. And during those first fifteen years, Fin and Marty were together with the rest of the family for every American holiday, most birthday parties and many times in between. The extremely intense circumstances involved in the eventual loss of his close, lifelong relationship with his aunt and uncle caused him to loose most of his faith in family. That nearly destroys who he is.

Due to the fact that the young nephew had been so familiar to his aunt and uncle, they knew his natural born personal strengths and weaknesses. We all have our own. Fin and Marty instinctively knew how to either help him to mature and to grow into a stronger, healthier and happier young man, or how they could use their intimate knowledge of the strong and the weak parts of his personality to take full, self serving advantage of him. They selfishly chose the latter.

When he was working and living at the Lodge, his aunt and uncle attempted to control his dating life. They somewhat slyly, but quite obviously to him at the time, pushed their choice for his girlfriend on him. She was a nice girl, just not the right one for him. Then when he was dating a different nice young lady, those two manipulative, quasi-bullies made his life as miserable as they could. His new girlfriend was his uncle’s best friend’s daughter, and Fin and Marty feared that he would get her pregnant and ruin their friendship with her parents.

His girlfriend’s parents treated him fine. They still treated him fine after her bush pilot dad flew over a potato farmer’s backfield, in a little ol’ bush plane, at treetop level, while flying around looking to spot wild game coming out to eat at dusk, and her father spotted her and Fin and Marty’s nephew parked back there in a pickup truck, making out.

Had the young nephew offended and angered any of the local population in any way, his aunt and uncle would have had to, in the least, send him away from there for good. Had he committed a serious enough offense, and maybe they would have also had to leave.

Had he screwed up badly while guiding the bear hunters, it could have cost his aunt and uncle their business.

The fact that he fully lived up to his responsibilities as a local ambassador for their business and a professional hunting guide never meant anything at all to his two completely unappreciative relatives. Fin and Marty never say one good word to anyone at all about what their nephew has accomplished as a kid from the suburbs who moved way up into the woods and successfully fit right in. He gets along nicely in the, typically more or less closed to outsiders, American small town society there. He risks his life nearly everyday for Fin and Marty, while learning to master numerous woodsmen’s skills; and as I have already said twice before, but is worth repeating, that included tracking wounded bears at night and unarmed, and even by himself at times—without hardly any fear at all. The young man never screws up badly in anyway. He makes his aunt and uncle a lot of money while helping them get their business going good. Their business becomes the number-one-top bear hunting lodge in the Great State of Maine—partly due to the fact that the young nephew does things the right way, and very well, I must add.

His two completely unappreciative relatives never thank him in any way. Ever.

One thing that really bothered him severely, about the situation in Maine, was that he could never allow his paternal grandparents to come visit him at the Lodge.

For the main character, not having the pleasure of showing his sport fisherman granddad some fantastic fishing, and other fine times in the Great Outdoors of Maine is a loss that he can’t seem to get past. His granddad was an old West Virginia mountain boy, and Granddad was the quintessential, natural born strong as an Ox member of the young guide's family. Granddad had worked for most of his life in the blast furnaces of the steel mill that Finley had worked in, as a bricklayer, before moving to Maine. The old man had retired as the foreman of the two largest blast furnaces there. Those blast furnace foremen were good bosses, they were good with a handling a shovel, and were experts at running the overhead cranes that were in each furnace—in an extremely hot, terribly dirty and very dangerous place. Back in those days, blast furnace foremen were all around about the hardest working men that the grandson ever knew of. Granddad was just the kinda’ down to earth fellow that his grandson's older friends in Maine would have enjoyed getting to know. Both the men and the women Mainers would have like meeting Granddad. Granddad was a self taught car mechanic, and if he had gone up to stay there at the Lodge for a week or so, he would have definitely tried to get into working on the Lodge’s trucks, or something. Granddad came from the old school, where you pitched in and helped without being asked to. The young guide's paternal grandfather was as good a man as ever lived.

The young guide's paternal grandmother was a Welshwoman who had come to America as a US Army Captain’s children’s nanny, during World War One. Grandmom was about as good as they get at home cooking and other homemaking skills. She would have fit right in with the countrywomen who worked for Marty, at the Lodge. Grandmom would have pitched in and helped around the Lodge too, without being asked. If her professional woodsman grandson could have invited his grandparents up for a visit, Grandmom woulda’ definitely had to get into that kitchen and cook something for the crowd there. It was a matter of pride in her skills. And not being able to sit still with a great big, well equipped, well stocked kitchen right there where she could get to it. She could cook and bake as well as any grandmother ever could. And clean too. She’d have been right up there beside the other women and helping them to make beds and all. She loved good conversation, and the women working at the Lodge did too. It would have been a wonderful experience for all involved. If Fin and Marty could have controlled themselves, while their nephew's grandparents were there.

Unfortunately, had the young guide's father's parents come to visit at the Lodge, when Fin had started in on his daily verbal abuse of the young man, the paternal grandparents would have gotten thoroughly upset about it. After a few of those stomach turning scenes, the grandparents would have informed, in no uncertain terms, you can believe me that his loving grandparents would have informed Fin and Marty just how lousy of a pair of relatives that they were. The young guide’s paternal grandparents were not going to start a big argument, because they were too level headed for that kind of an embarrassing confrontation. They would have looked Fin and Marty straight in their faces and let them know eggzzactely how they felt. Then when the grandparents drove on back down to Sparrows Point, Maryland, their grandson would have left out of there with them.

Fin and Marty had known their nephew's paternal grandparents quite well—the tight, extended family that I already told you about. And because the grandfather had held a blue-collar man's very respectable position in the steel mill, Finley may have laid off on the emotional abuse, against his nephew, for a while. But that's doubtful. So for the nephew, it wasn't worth the risk of asking his paternal grandparents up for a visit.

Had the nephew's paternal grandparents come up to visit and Fin and Marty had not calmed down a little and respected their nephew's grandparents, then when those grandparents had witnessed enough of Fin and Marty's abuse, the situation would have gone real bad, real fast. And that young hunting guide might have had to kick his uncle's ass all over the place. His paternal grandparents had always been his favorite family members. He might have silently suffered that abuse against himself, but if one itty-bitty bit of that crap had splattered onto his paternal grandparents then he would have put a stop to it, immediately.

Fin was much larger and stronger than his nephew, but Uncle Finley had no idea how good of a kick that his nineteen-year-old nephew had. The kid had a bit of a good punch too; his father had taught him the basics of boxing; the kid had taken a few months of Karate classes, and knew just a little about tight-fisted-double-knuckle, and also heel of the hand type punches; but the one thing that he had gotten down pat was a good Karate kick. Just the most basic, simple, forward kick, but he had a real good feel for it.

Had Uncle Fin disrespected the kid's grandparents, welp, now, Fin never would have expected what came next. That young man would have kicked his bombastic, belligerent, disrespectful, foul-mouthed uncle's legs right out from under him. The element of surprise. Yeah! And the young man would have never allowed his larger opponent to get back up again. Not until foul-mouthed Finley was subdued, and he apologized.

This is not wishful hindsight. Recall the workload that I carried everyday. Look at the photo taken of me when I was nearly finished up with splitting the better part of nineteen cords of hardwood. I averaged ten, hard laboring hours a day at working on that wood pile. I did that for each of the five weekdays during a two-week period of time—about ninety hours worth of splittin' and stackin' time in two weeks. Now add in the justifiable anger, followed by the subsequent surge of adrenalin. I would have, friggin' aye right, kicked Finley's gahdamned ass—good and proper, too.

Ten years later, in 1979, Finley had tried to strangle and then punch me, but I easily handled him by using my limited knowledge of defensive moves.

The main character in this movie's maternal grandparents had visited the Lodge while he was there. They had witnessed what their young grandson was being put through up there. But Finley was their pride and joy; he could do no wrong. They did not care about the abuses. At all. And mother and father and son, all three, were an argumentative lot, for sure. After more than one of their arguments, Finley and his father did not speak to each other for a long time. And the young guide’s maternal grandparents often quarreled with each other. Some nasty quarrels too.

For years, the main character in this movie holds it all deep down inside of himself…the abuses and the losses, his anger at his Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley for not paying him all of the money and respect that he had earned at Katahdin Lodge. He lost family. He lost the fully deserved privileges of spending time with his friends in Maine. He lost the pleasures of showing his other family members and his other friends, who did not live in Maine, a very good time up in the vast North Woods. He lost the many natural benefits, the character building responsibilities and the personal satisfactions, of being able to work as a professional outdoors adventure guide. And he holds in his own ensuing loss of self-respect. The swirling, confusing combination of all of those awful feelings churns around inside of him, like the fuel components of liquid explosives mixing together—while corroding his psyche and soul.

{End of Section 1 of this 4-part document. Please continue on to Section 2 / Northern Maine Adventures / The Movie, in the blog post below this one, the previous post. It'll be well worth your time--I swear to it! READ ON! }

{This is Section 2 of a 4-part document that is read from the top of the blog down--from the latest Northern Maine Adventures / The Movie blog post down through the older ones; just the opposite from how blogs are normally read. I guarantee that this well written document is full of interesting, entertaining, and even shocking snippets---all the way through. I do believe that you'll enjoy this. Read on! }

The main character in this movie left Katahdin Lodge in November of 1969, to enter the US Army. He was glad to go. He went back to visit them once, while he was home on leave during May 1970; and they treated him like they always had. Not like a soldier home on leave—on vacation from the Army. Then he went to Okinawa for a year and a half. While he was serving on Okinawa, all of that abuse that Fin and Marty had put him through finally sunk in. Consequently, he did not have anything to do with them two rude relatives of his for the next seven years.

In early summer of 1977, the nephew called his aunt and uncle and suggested that it was time that they tried to mend the broken family ties. He had heard that they needed help up there. So he made a deal with Fin and Marty that he would go up to the Lodge, stay for two weeks, help out, and if it worked out then he would stay and work for them. He told his aunt and uncle that if it did not work out as a business relationship, then they could consider that two weeks of work to be a vacation for him. Then he would amicably leave, and the rest of their family would be relieved to know that he and his aunt and uncle were on friendly terms again. He ended up staying and working for several months, but they still did not pay him a salary. Nor did they change their attitudes towards him. He stuck it out until it was time for the fall college semester and went down to the University of Maine at Farmington. He had set it up to start classes and go there by using his GI Bill benefits. But those GI Bill monthly checks don't start coming in until about two months after classes begin. He had expected to receive a fair lump sum payment, from Fin and Marty, at the end of his summer of working for them. He got $150.00 from them. The friggin' grass and weed cutting, alone, that he did that summer was worth more than that.

So he never got to take those classes at UMF. Instead, he worked down there in Farmington for a while, took some Veteran’s Educational Enrichment Program classes—sort of high school refresher classes—and went back up to stay at the Lodge for Thanksgiving, and then also for Christmas.

Fin and Marty went down to Maryland together to see their families for that Christmas. That was great for them. Because ever since they had moved to Maine in 1965, they had only been able to leave and go to Maryland separately—one of them always had to stay and watch the Lodge. Then after they returned from Maryland, their nephew went back to Farmington, gathered up his belongings and moved back to Maryland.

He was so pissed off at his aunt and uncle for not paying him what he had earned, that he did not tell them that he had left Maine. He needed his salary from that summer to pay for college expenses, until the GI Bill checks came. But he was determined to mend family ties and not start a fight over the money. It would have been a fruitless effort to try and get that money, so he just moved on.

In early summer of 1979, he was living back in Dundalk, Maryland. Marty had called him by telephone to ask if he would come back up and work for them again. He agreed, but only because she made all kinds of promises of fair wages and full benefits. She did pay him a full salary, and he got to use one of the Lodge's trucks to go out socializing on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons, but the promised medical and several other earned benefits were never going to be given to him.

When Marty had contacted him, that summer, Finley had two hunting guides working for him, and he needed one or two more. One guide was a native Maine man, Richard Libby, a top-notch woodsman—all the way. The other was a jerky, nineteen-year-old kid from Pennsylvania who was a wana’bee a real Maine guide. In the whole of Northern Maine, no one else was willing to put up with Fin and Marty's bullcrap.

It is important for me to say here that on the up side of all of this is that working with top-notch Maine Guides like Gary, Richard and Finley was a privilege to the main character in this movie. It was a great honor. A good way to put this in its proper perspective is to say that if the nephew were given the choice of being able to say that he had worked alongside of those professional woodsmen or that he had traveled the world with The Rolling Stones on tour and as their personal photographer, he'd take the time spent up in Maine. Those outdoorsmen are that high caliber in their profession.

That summer, Finley—the number one bear hunting guide in Maine—had told Marty that he and his other two guides could only handle twenty bear hunters per week. But greedy ol' Marty was taking in all of the hunters that she could get. The first week that their nephew went back to work at the Lodge, there were thirty-six hunters there. That is a lot for four guides to handle, and too much for three.

During bear season, the guides were never given any time off on weekdays, or Saturday mornings and afternoons. If any bears were shot on a Saturday evening, then Sunday morning was bear skinning time. The Sunday skinning chores went with the territory, the nephew fully accepted that, but Marty was loath to allow the guides any time off on Sundays, because the new batch of hunters comes in on Sunday. And hunters like to meet their guides as soon as possible, to start asking them bear hunting questions; and they like to go across the road to the Lodge’s rifle range and do some target practice—to sight their guns in. It is best to have a guide over there being a range safety officer for them, unless the hunters are already known to be competent with firearms. The main character of this movie understands what the hunters want and need, but the guides all need some time off.

His aunt and uncle could have given each of their three guides separate half-days off during the middle of the week. That half-day off could compensate for any Sunday bear skinning time, and it would have worked out OK if each guide was assigned to hang around the Lodge on one Sunday afternoon per every three weeks. Then that guide would have a half-day off in the middle of the week.

Neither the nephew nor the other guides would ever be so damned dumb as to suggest that to Fin and Marty though. Fin might go along with it, even though he was a workaholic who didn’t ever want much time off for himself, he might have been willing to give his guides a break. Marty, though, greedy, brutally greedy Marty would have gotten disgustingly nasty about it.

In 1979, the twenty-nine-year-old nephew greatly desired to finally have that chance to live and work up in Maine again, but only because he was going to be paid fair wages and benefits. He wasn’t working for nearly nothing, besides room and board again, like in 1968-69 and ‘77. But due to circumstances beyond his control, that 1979 attempt at family reconciliation, and having more wild and wonderful adventures in Maine, ends quickly—in a near murderous situation. He nearly explodes when his uncle does him wrong one time too many.

His uncle and aunt blame it all on him.

Fin and Marty and their nephew never have anything to do with each other again.

His experiences in 1977 and '79 add more fuel to that 1969 instilled soul and psyche eroding explosive mixture and it continues to ferment inside of the nephew.

Many emotionally excruciating times, when the nephew is casually conversing with some other person or a small group of people, and he is telling some of his entertaining and informative oral histories about his adventures in Maine there often comes a time during the warm conversation when his happy, attentive listeners ask him why the hell it is that he isn't still up there in the Maine woods and having some more of those great adventures. That hurts. Then he has no reasonable choice but to inform his listeners about the demoralizing and depressing facts concerning how he was miserably mistreated and cheated by his aunt and uncle. What a bummer.

And then, here and there, now and then, someone will ask him why it is that neither his parents nor grandparents never told Fin and Marty to set things right with him.

The answer has several layers to it:

His maternal grandparents had raised their son Finley to believe that he was better than everyone else.

Finley, in fact, actually was better than most others at anything he did.

Before Finley moved up to Maine, when he worked as a bricklayer down at the Bethlehem Steel Mill in Sparrows Point, Maryland, he would often work double shifts while outlaying any man there. Most of the time, he definitely laid more brick and block than any of the other guys on a job site; and those rows of brick and block that he laid were straight and level, always.

The men who worked with Finley "Down The Point" had nicknamed him "Loud Mouthed Finley Clarke." Finley's young nephew heard that from a guy who had worked Down The Point as a bricklayer too, but that guy also jovially informed the nephew that no man down there would ever so much as utter that nickname anywhere near where Finley could here it. As the Beth Steel bricklayers all worked there together in the heat, or the cold, and always in the ever-present iron ore based mill dust and dirt, Loud Mouthed Finley Clarke would sometimes tell anyone and everyone around him just exactly what he thought of them.

Finley was a rather large man, well fed and possessing well-hardened-working-man's muscles; and there was very little fat on him. To the best of the nephew's knowledge, his Uncle Finley had never actually threatened or outright went about to intimidate anyone, but no one ever dared test him.

There were times, though, when ol' Fin was right on key when he was singin' one of his improvised on the spot, bombastic songs at certain unreasonably uppity individuals or groups of people who had fully deserved to be put back in their place. Fin certainly would run his mouth more than was ever necessary, though. It was one way—an unhealthy way—that he dealt with stress. That is now known as a clear-cut symptom of PTSD. Korean War induced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

When Finley K. Clarke got pissed off at something or someone, he was no one to be around. He would yell and swear and cuss and throw things all about. It did not matter to him whether it was a coworker, his wife Martha, his young nephew, another hunting guide working at Katahdin Lodge, a paying hunter or anyone else at all. Finley Clarke said what he felt like saying to, and blew his top in front of, anyone and everyone. He often lost his grip. That is also a clear-cut symptom of PTSD.

Finley used to go down to the state house in Augusta, Maine to fight for sensible hunting laws and also for infrastructure improvements to the state owned roads up around Patten. He did some real good things down there. Including getting the laws on the books for a one bear per hunter, per season ruling and also the law that established the hunting rule that finally made it illegal to kill bear cubs.

Naturally, Finley's way of doing things and speaking in front of the state house assembly there had earned him some antagonists and enemies.

Finley despised, absolutely despised, setting there in the state house, while waiting for his turn to go up to the podium to speak. And he especially hated having to listen to the Native Maine Indian leaders fighting for their tribe's treaty rights. The well deserving Indians finally did win part of their battle to begin receiving some of what they had been promised for generations. And that historically fair turn of events had riled Finley to no end. He and his wife Martha were one locked-tight pair of completely prejudiced persons. They outright hated any non-white people. They had no respect at all for the God given equal rights of African Americans. Their shared and stated opinion was that, "when a white woman is walking down the street, and she walks past a colored man, he should tip his hat to the white lady, and step down off of the curb, until the white lady passes by."

Throughout the entire course of human kind, whenever human beings deny other human beings their God given rights, it has never, ever worked out well in the long run.

Well now, one day down at the state house a lot of people—politicians, news reporters, citizens, lobbyists—were waiting in the lobby for the doors to open and allow them to go in to do a session of political wrangling, on each other. All of a sudden, from somewhere in there amongst that crowd, one of Finley's antagonists boldly blurts out, "Well Finley, what are you down here for this time?"

I can never remember exactly how the whole story goes. I had heard my uncle tell it twice, but can't recall it all. What I do recall is this:

Finley stood there in that crowded state house lobby and loudly replied to his bold antagonist, "Well, let me tell you now. I'm tired of the Indians, and the niggers, and…", and I sure wish that I could remember the rest of what he had replied. But he always ended the story with a big wide grin spread out all over his ugly white mug, and deep throated, devious chuckles spouting out from between his lips, when he added, "And you shoulda seen 'um all moving away from me. Heh, heh, heh."

He had been that way all his life, and my family was resigned to accept him as he was.

At the opposite end of Finley's, oft shocking, personality's spectrum, he could be a lot of laughs and told entertaining stories. When he was in a good mood, he was tremendously enjoyable to be around. This movie's main character's family, and many other folks, loved Finley's sense of humor and the great stories that he often told. At family gatherings, Finley was a wonderful man to sit near and listen to—especially for his young nephew. Fin was generous and would help anyone in his family with anything he could. You could rely on that. His friends could always rely on him too.

Though the nephew understands that his family has always accepted Finley the way that he is, the young man feels deeply hurt by, and angry at, his parents and grandparents. Had the nephew confronted his aunt and uncle and demanded his full rights and benefits, they would have gone nuts on him. That was obvious. He had seen plenty enough to know that. But he has his own life to live, and he needs some of his older family members to tell Fin and Marty to get their heads out of their asses and to pay that young man all of the money that he had earned, along with the full respect that he had earned.

If Fin and Marty had finally been convinced/forced to pay their debts to our main character here, and to admit to anyone and everyone that their nephew had done an excellent job for them, whilst working at Katahdin Lodge as a Registered Maine Hunting Guide, it would have made everyone's lives much easier. And because of the hard, cold fact that Fin and Marty would never admit to anyone at all that their nephew had become such an accomplished young outdoorsman, they would never, ever give him an employment reference, so that he could go work somewhere else. He had not planned on working at Katahdin Lodge for the rest of his life, after his military service obligations had been satisfied, but his Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley had.

When he was working in Maine, in 1969, and then when he was in the Army, in 1969-71, he had actually planned on doing a lot of traveling and working all around the world, after he was going to be discharged from the Army. He wanted to be an outdoors adventures guide who catered to the needs and wants of the types of paying clients who were into eating his, made from scratch, fresh baked goods and delicious, healthy meals that he had prepared over an open fire. It would not have mattered to him if his clients were hunters, fishers, photographers, hikers, campers, snowmobilers, artists, meditaters, primal screamers or whatever, as long as they enjoyed leaving the confines of any lodge that he might work for and to go out and rough it up some in the wilderness.

But for the young nephew to be able to work someplace else, besides Katahdin Lodge, at the same high level of responsibility at being an outdoors adventure guide, the level that he had successfully risen to at Katahdin Lodge, then he needed an honest employment reference from his uncle and aunt. If them two ignorant relatives of his had not actually been ignorant, he would have somehow included working at Katahdin Lodge and helping them out now and then into his traveling outdoorsman's life. But whether they were good to him or not, he was planning on experiencing living and working in many more parts of the world than just Maryland, Northern Maine and Okinawa.

As far as Fin and Marty were concerned, though, their nephew was to either work for them forever, while being thoroughly abused and grossly underpaid, or he could go to Hell.

After the nephew was discharged from the Army, he had wanted to have had the opportunity to work at Katahdin Lodge during some hunting seasons. And maybe would have helped out at the Lodge during some winter times to be able to enjoy the fun and adventure of the snowmobiling, snow shoeing and cross country skiing opportunities up there. It would have been a fair deal for Fin and Marty, because they needed lots of snow shoveled and plowed, plus other outside and inside maintenance work and also upgrades done for the Lodge.

While working and living at the Lodge, the young nephew is very limited in his possibilities for having all types of various outdoors fun and adventure. This is due to the sad fact that Fin and Marty are too crude and rude to be providing other types of lodging and guiding services for potential paying clientele besides for men in a hunting trip frame of mind.

Many a time, throughout his post Katahdin Lodge life, the nephew feels stung by the fact that his aunt and uncle in Maine would never have allowed him to begin providing guide and lodging services for non-hunting clientele. He knows that it would be good for the Lodge's business.

He wants to take tourists on photography tours, and out mountain biking, or on off road four wheeler and motorcycling trips. He plans, in his head, to build hiking trails all back through the 500 acres or so of woods that the Lodge owned, which lay behind it. And those woods are the beginning of 90 miles of vast forestland that stretches all the way to Canada. He makes mental plans for putting in primitive campsites back there. And outhouses. Then, from that campground and trail system, he could cut all kinds of trails all back through those woods. And, of course, there is always plenty of room back there for bushwhacking through the woods without the benefits of cut and/or marked trails.

He is an all around good swimmer, due to the fact that by the time that he was fourteen-years-old, he had completed four levels of Red Cross swimming courses. He had passed his Junior Lifesaving course, which only differed slightly from Senior Lifesaving. In Senior Lifesaving the students swam more laps during training, and in order for them to pass the final test they had to swim out three times as far, as Junior Lifesavers did, to rescue a lifeguard who was pretending to drown. But the pollution in the water where he lived at in Maryland closed the local beaches to swimmers, before he could take Senior Lifesaving classes there. He is very comfortable and competent in and around deep water, so any canoeing, boating or swimming trips that he may have guided clients on would have been considerably safer, because he was there. And {Man O' Day!} there's a lot of naturally clean water up there to swim in.

He desires to become a top-notch Fly Fisherman and to guide other folks who want to Fly Fish, Ice Fish or enjoy the outdoors pleasures of doing any other kind of fishing that their hearts desire. He doesn't mind cleaning fish and loves cooking them.

He wants to build Star Huts. Star huts? Gazebo style huts set up so that people can take telescopes out into the woods and view the heavens through minimally polluted skies, and in relative comfort. And during biting-insect seasons, the huts would have bug proof netting hung across all of the openings in them. There would be Velcro zippers in the netting where the amateur astronomers can stick the ends of the telescopes out of, then tuck the zippers tight and keep the bugs out. The Star Huts would have nice little wood heaters in the center of them.

He thinks up plans for a goodly number of other possible additions to the Lodge's business and property. Including: a small movie theater, a radio station, and maybe a dance hall—with a spring mounted dance floor. But will the heavy boozers and other troublemakers cause too many problems and ruin the business of a peaceful-fun oriented dance hall? Yeah, probably, but it might work. Would rowdy drunks and other troublemakers shut down the movie theater? Not if it was small and mostly for guests who were staying at the Lodge. The radio station would play a variety of musical styles, and there would be both recorded and live music broadcasts. Most of those live music playing musicians would be as local to Northern Maine as possible. There would definitely have to be Maine humorists telling jokes and stories, for both live and recorded shows. Maybe the movie theater could double as a venue for live broadcasts of homegrown Northern Maine entertainment—musicians, comedians, story tellers, and comedy skits put on by little theater groups. The folks up there woulda' certainly enjoyed listening to, and participating in, those live broadcast radio shows.

In the summer of 1973, the 23-year-old nephew’s back is injured. It happened when a car ran a red light and hit the nephew, while the young man was riding on his 1973 Yamaha 650 motorcycle. As a result of the red light runner’s negligence, the young nephew suffers from a degenerative back injury—for the rest of his life. That injury gradually, steadily increases in levels of pain and disability.

During the first few years of his degenerative back injury, the nephew realizes that he may, someday, become permanently dependent on a wheelchair for personal mobility. Consequently, the resourceful young man begins to plan out how to hunt and/or to take wildlife photographs from a motor vehicle, which is set up for the maximum convenience of people in wheelchairs. He ponders how to work it so that he can guide wheelchair-dependent clientele on hunts and photo safaris. He knows that some people need time in the woods alone, so he thinks through ideas on how to coordinate safe, soul-satisfying time out there alone for anyone in a wheelchair. Nobody wants to sit out there in the peaceful woods with a two-way radio crackin' and hissin’ all the time. Guides for people in wheelchairs must stay close enough to their clientele to be there incase of emergency, but the guides must stay far enough away from their clientele to allow for the wheelchair-dependent folks to live great, pleasantly memorable, personal adventures out in the woods alone. That all, of course, could only be worked out safely and correctly by the nephew while living up in the Maine woods and testing wheelchair lift equipped vans, small trucks and busses and trying out various types of radio equipment, and then the new cell phone services.

During the mid 1970s, the nephew taught himself how to bake homemade deserts, from scratch only, using whole-wheat floor, honey, and other all-natural ingredients. His Aunt Martha once told him that he should use Vanillin, instead of real Vanilla Extract, because Vanillin's cheaper. The last thing that he would skimp on is the price of a measly little ol' teaspoon of Vanilla flavoring. Marty was very serious about that, and she would be very upset if he had tried to do it any other way in her kitchen. So ya' know that he would have never been able to get into the Lodge's kitchen and comfortably bring some delicious all natural recipes into use there. He also likes to prepare big, wholesome, meals made from fresh ingredients. He makes, what an old friend of his once called, a super salad. He loves to fix huge bowls of garden salad. But Marty did a lot of her food prep work by opening those large, commercial sized, Number 10 cans. And she hired a local woman to do most of the Lodge’s baking. The nephew really woulda' loved to have gotten in that kitchen and learned a lot from that countrywoman who did the fresh baking. That pleasant and plump old country gal mighta' used white flour and sugar in her baked goods, but she knew how to really do it right. And she would have enjoyed his company in the kitchen, because he adored her—like a grandson would have.

The nephew knows that there are old, abandoned, fallen down, overgrown hunting lodges, hunting camps, and logging camps scattered throughout the woods of Maine. Some of those lodges catered to wealthy clientele, who came on hunting and fishing trips to Maine. And they came with the best bottles of booze that money could buy, back then in the early 1900s or late 1800s. Those old booze bottles were some kind of fancy, and are now worth a lot of money to bottle collectors. Those lodges and camps all had their own dumps, somewhere near by. Those old dumps, along with the lodge and camp areas, possess great possibilities for a person who wants to search for old bottles and other buried treasures. Had the main character in this movie been able to spend more time hanging out with his older Mainer friends and acquaintances, he could have found out from some of those old timers where some of the abandoned lodges and camps used to be; and he could have explored those locations for treasure hunting purposes. Plus he could have stumbled onto to a few of those old places, while performing his everyday outdoors adventure guide duties, or during his personal hiking and exploring adventures. He could have had his own prized collection of old bottles and artifacts, plus added to his monetary wealth by selling some of those antiques. After Fin and Marty got their cut of the take, of course.

He wants to buy and sell old barn wood. Weathered old wood from barns is used for arts and crafts, interior decorating, paneling club basements, and picture frames. There is a lot of it up in Maine. The nephew and his aunt and uncle would all profit from this, and so would many local Maine folks who owned property with old barns, sheds, or other old worn out and falling down buildings on it. But there are two reasons why this would never happen. One is that it was the nephew’s idea, not his aunt and uncle’s, and they could not have him completely under their control if they listened to his good ideas. Two is that if they did listen, and had allowed their entrepreneurial, young nephew to buy and sell barn wood, they would have taken most of the profit for themselves. Because as long as their nephew worked for them, his time was all theirs, and they wanted to control all of his work time—anything that he did was to be done for their profit.

During his 1977 experiences at Katahdin Lodge, the nephew learns that there is a thriving Asian market for bear parts. In certain Asian countries, Black Bear's gallbladders are used in natural medications, and they are worth a lot of money. Bear paw soup is a prized delicacy in Asia. Sometime in the early 1970s, Finley had begun collecting the gallbladders from all bears killed at the Lodge, and Fin sold them wholesale to a Chinese guy in New York City.

After the nephew had been stationed on Okinawa, as a US Army photographer, he had wanted to go back to travel all over Asia. He could have financed at least one really good yearly trip to Asia with the sales of legally harvested bear parts. He'd have shot his own one bear per year, ate the meat, had the hide made into a coat or something, made jewelry out of the teeth and claws, and he'd have frozen the gallbladder and paws then taken his frozen bear parts and the frozen gallbladders from the bears killed by the Lodge's paying hunters and he'd have done alright in Asia with them bear parts for sale. He'd have never gone in for poaching, illegally killing, bears for their body parts, though, because that is not his way of doing things. Neither was it Fin and Marty's. If the nephew had been able to work for them two and take the parts to Asia himself, Fin and Marty would have made a much larger profit off of their bear part sales. But to Fin and Marty, that time in Asia would have been time that they wanted their nephew to be slaving away for them at the Lodge. And the idea of them loosing complete control over the bear parts business transactions would have broiled their very own gizzards.

Finley was in the Regular Army, the Reserves, then the National Guard, until he retired from military service. His nephew was a US Army trained photographer. So you would think that Fin and Marty would respect their nephew's photography training and work and that they would endorse it. You would think that they would have helped him do some of his photography in Maine. But they could not control it if they let him do that. They could not make most of the profit from it.

It would have helped their business to have some of his great photos of the everyday goings at Katahdin Lodge floating around to advertise the place. Paying hunters would have bought many of his photographs then taken them home and showed them around, and would have given some away to their family and friends. The nephew would have had wonderful photos of the Maine countryside and of Mainers at work and play. That sells. The Maine folks there would have loved his work too. And he wanted to build custom photo frames out of old barn wood for those finest kind of Maine photographs of his. But Fin and Marty completely dismissed and disrespected his photography. Everybody lost out on that one.

Another substantial loss to the nephew is that he never had the opportunity to live with, love and nurture a nice little family of his own up in Northern Maine. He had thought this through, and at one time it was something that he had hoped to do, but it would have turned out badly. Because if he had gotten married and he and his wife had conceived or adopted children, and he had gone back to working, and maybe even living, at the Lodge, his aunt and uncle would have mistreated both him and his little family.

Fin and Marty never would have allowed him to live or work at the Lodge if he was cohabitating up there with a woman whom he wasn't married to. That wasn't going to happen. They were not religious, just a bit old fashioned in their view of the world.

During the summer of 1968, on his very first teenage, social excursion into the Town of Patten, he had become enamored with those attractive, young women up in Northern Maine. He loved those country girls, and they loved him. Well, 'ah mean now, there weren't a bunch of 'um fightin' over 'im, but he never had much of a problem gettin' good girlfriends, back then. Up there, or anywhere, he did all right for himself with the young ladies. He has never lost his desire to marry a woman from up in that part of the world. He simply finds country girls to be far more attractive than any other type of fine female.

Whether it had been a little darlin' from up there in Maine, or from anywhere else, if he had gotten married and taken his sweet, young bride up to Katahdin Lodge, for any reason or amount of time, it would have been a bad situation for that young couple. The young husband's aunt and uncle would hardly have had any respect at all for the feelings of that young nephew of theirs and his young wife. Fin and Marty would have reinstated their self-serving, selfish, rude, mean and ignorant daily dumping of their crap on him. His wife would have been mercilessly spattered with that crap. The husband would have been humiliated by how Fin and Marty treated him in front of his wife; and his wife would have been appalled and humiliated by the way that her young husband was taking that crap from those two dungheads. That crap could have ruined, probably would have ruined, any married life that the nephew may have had, if he had indeed tried to resume working, and maybe even living, up there at Katahdin Lodge.

Oh yeah, now. As long as the young husband was willing to work for them again, Fin and Marty would have given him and his wife a place to live. In fact, Fin and Marty would have done their self-serving best (with too many false promises involved) to invite, entice, influence, persuade, and cajole their young nephew, and their niece—by marriage, to move in at the Lodge. That would be so that Fin and Marty could regain maximum control over their hard working nephew and to try and bring his new wife onboard, as their semi-slave too.

Had the nephew been married, his young wife may have had a good career going for herself that she was working in up in Maine. Or she might have worked at the Lodge in a paid cooking or housekeeping staff position.

Or maybe she would not have worked at any of those occupations, and she was a busy housewife raising a small child, or two, or more. Let's say that she was always busy with her housewife chores. Say that she was darn good at: taking tender-loving care of the kids, preparing wholesome-homemade meals, keeping the home tidy, and nurturing family love with her husband and their children. Let's also say that the married couple had bought a trailer home and parked it on the Lodge's property. It is quite normal up in Maine to see someone's trailer home parked on one of their relative's property. But no matter what the young wife had to do during the day, if she was living on the Lodge's property, whenever she was on the Lodge's property, Fin and Marty would have expected her to find some time to do some work for them; even if the nephew had negotiated full compensation for the trailer's ground rent to be deducted from his weekly wages.

Had the trailer occupant wife been a hard working, successful, personal career oriented young woman, who may have preferred to only cook and clean for herself, her husband and their children, she'd of still been expected to help Marty do the Lodge's cooking and cleaning work. No matter how many hunters and others were there to cook for, if the wife was there at meal preparation times, she would have been expected in the kitchen. Consequently, any healthy, married life strengthening mealtime privacy for the young couple would have found no place at the Lodge.

If the young couple had not been able to afford to buy a trailer, the amount of love making privacy that the newlyweds would have enjoyed would have all depended on where Fin and Marty made them sleep. It would have either been out in one of the Lodge's uninsulated, unsheetrocked or paneled, cabins that did not have a full bathroom or a full kitchen, or it would have been in the main building of the Lodge. In the main building, the walls of the bedrooms are not very soundproof, and the paying guests and the Lodge staff are often plentiful in that building. The paying guests were mostly men—groups of strangers who were there a week at a time. You damned well know that in amongst that many men there were going to be a few jerks who were gonna' try some sexual advances on that young wife or make other rude insults to her. Especially if she and her husband had been making a lot of noisy love the night before. Ain't no doubt about it.

If that young married couple had tried to raise children all knee-deep in Fin and Marty's crap, it most definitely would have caused them kids to loose respect for their hard working father and mother. And, while growing up, as witnesses to that crap they would never have gained very much self-respect for themselves. With Finley and Martha Clarke, it was all about keeping their nephew emotionally hobbled, under their complete control and in semi-slave-like-servitude for life.

That is a soul scrunching loss to the nephew. He would have loved to have been able to settle down some day and raise a family up in Patten, Maine; after he had done a heap of traveling and working all around the world as a professional outdoorsman.

Whether he was married or not, if the nephew had come back to work at the Lodge but had chosen to live in his own home, like in a great big, comfortable, inexpensive fixer upper country house, or a snug and comfortable little lakeside cabin, then Fin and Marty would have had to pay him more than just room and board plus a little bit of pocket cash. They did not like the idea of paying their nephew a full salary.

If the nephew had lived in his own home while working at the Lodge, then Fin and Marty would have continuously been real-low-key-type-always-a-bit-extra-mean-and-nasty to him. They'd have done all that they could to make him miserable. Anytime that he was late for work, the nasty shit would fly—furiously so. When it was fair times for him to be let off work to be able go home, maybe to his wife and kids, Fin and Marty would have found more work for him to do.

I'm telling ya' now, them two friggin relatives of his were somethin' else!

While he was in the Army, the nephew had plenty of time to think through the slave-like limitations of what his future at Katahdin Lodge could be like. He knew that his aunt and uncle wanted him to come back there to work, after he was discharged from the Army. He was also sure that, some time in the distant future from 1971, the Lodge would one day be his, if he did go back there to work. But the reason that he had not gone back to the Lodge for six years after he received his military discharge was because of some of the easily foreseeable problems already written about on here and then one more.

The final decision not to go back to Maine, after the Army, was made when the young soldier realized that he would never be able to invite his Puerto Rican and African American GI buddies and their families up to the Lodge. He figured that if they were all there serving and defending their country together, while helping each other through that crappy time in United States history when many Americans were very disrespectful to their armed services personnel—both active military and recently discharged Vietnam Era Veterans—then his non-white friends were all good enough people to visit each other in each other's homes. He was a natural born guide, so he wanted to show a few of his GI buddies and their families great times up in the woods. One of the best friends that he ever had was a Puerto Rican GI from New York City. Showing a bunch of New Yorkers, or anyone from anywhere else, some good, memorable times in the wild woods of Maine was something that the nephew always enjoyed, while guiding bear hunters. He'd have really gotten a kick out of showing his Army buddy's Puerto Rican family the finest kind of a family vacation time in Maine. His Puerto Rican friend had never even seen a live moocow till he was 12 years old. You can imagine how cool, fun, adventurous and rewarding it would have been for the nephew to have had the NYC friend bring his growing family up to Maine to spend time with the nephew's growing family. Then the nephew and his family would get to go visit NYC and see the real New York with lifelong residents of that, fantastic and wondrous, city as thier guides.

But Fin and Marty were not about to allow any non-white folks to stay at their Lodge. They did not want them as paying guests or any other kind of guests. If a black man called the Lodge to ask about going there on a hunting trip and whoever answered the phone, Fin or Marty, could tell that it was a black guy's voice, then they always said that they had no openings for whatever week that the black man wanted to go hunting. Uncle Finley K. and Aunt Martha Clarke were 100% prejudiced against all non-honky peoples.

Fin and Marty also hated Hippies. They outright despised it when any white men grew their hair long. Whether they were Hippies or not, no longhaired man could work there for them. And in 1969, no longhaired men came on a hunting trip to the Lodge; very few came in the later years, but when they did, Fin and Marty did not like it at all.

In 1969, when either Life or Look Magazine published a special-extra-insert for the Woodstock Music Festival, and that magazine was delivered to the Lodge, Fin and Marty launched off into quiverin' conniptions. They were truly pissed off at the world because Woodstock had happened.

If you think back on the music that I have written about for use in the sound track to this movie, you will easily figure that I would possibly have been at Woodstock myself, if I had not been way up in Maine where the young people did not yet know of those types of events to be happening.

The main character in this movie had wanted to grow his hair longer, but even if his aunt and uncle had allowed him to live at the Lodge with his hair grown long, he would have had a hard time fitting in with the teenagers up there if he had worn it long. He would have gotten into fights at dances and parties, for sure. In the summer of 1969, there were Hippies and other longhaired men living in other parts of Maine, but not up around Patten. It is a fact that the nephew only saw three or four longhaired guys up around Patten, Maine, during that entire first time that he was working and living there.

There were never gonna be any Hippies welcomed at Fin and Marty Clarke's Katahdin Lodge. And you must realize, now, that during the late 1960s and the early 1970s a large majority of the world’s youth were more or less what many people considered to be Hippies.

Due to all of the afore mentioned, serious prejudices of Finley and Martha’s, there was no way for their nephew to build up the Lodge's business with a campground back in the woods behind the Lodge, with star huts, or to provide lodging and guide services for hikers, photo tourists, mountain bikers, motorcyclists, etcetera, etcetera, because Fin and Marty could not stand to be around most of the people who would come to the Lodge for those outdoors activities. So the nephew had to live his life knowing what was very possible for great times at Katahdin Lodge, but never achieving his entrepreneurial dreams of what he deeply desired to accomplish there.

You cannot imagine what a stinging, lifelong loss it is for the seriously frustrated nephew to know that some parts of his well thought out plans and dreams for a good life in Maine, after he had done a few post-Army years of traveling the world as a pro-outdoorsman, could have been successful—if it hadn't been for his aunt and uncle's bullshit. The stingin', stinkin' emotional ramifications of these frustrating losses has pretty well run that nephew through a bit of a living hell.

This info about how the main character in the film is sometimes planning these dreams out, in his head, has a place in this movie somewhere. But from what angle does it come in? Do we make some of these dreams come true on film, and add some of these ideas into the Lodge's business? Or does the nephew talk about them to someone? A talk that takes place years after 1979.

The last time that he worked at the Lodge or ever saw his, once much loved, Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley was during the summer of 1979—on a bad day at Katahdin Lodge.

Once he had become that young woodsman up in Maine, it is simply a major part of who he is. Loosing verification of that level of achievement in the outdoors adventure world, due to his own beloved aunt and uncle's selfish ignorance, was too much for him to stomach. It rendered him emotional ill. The real gut kicker in this case is the hard, cold fact that he had risked his life, on a daily basis, for his aunt and uncle. That disturbing knowledge added some unbearable emotional weight upon the matter. And that terrible, soul crushing weight rendered him down into being a thoroughly disenchanted young man.

After living with and working for his aunt and uncle, the myriad of painful, emotional injuries inflicted upon him, by them, greatly contribute to him having a lifetime of family and other problems.

He suffers from severe depression, for his entire adult life.

He drinks way too much booze. Smokes a little weed.

He is more of a disappointment than not, to himself, his family, his friends, his employers and coworkers.

Has a lousy, nearly empty life.

His parents eventually die without ever seeing their only son become the full version of the good person, talented photographer and writer, loving family member, and professional outdoors adventure guide whom they knew he has the full potential to be. This hurts.

Fin died, after not speaking to anyone on his side of their family for many, many years. Marty has refused contact with Fin's side of the family too. But their nephew doesn’t know why that they had estranged themselves that way.

It isn't because of the nephew. About a year after Fin and his nephew had that near murderous encounter in '79, and parted ways for good, Finley had visited his sister, the nephew’s mother, at her house.

The estrangement has something to do with the way that the nephew's mother had handled the sale of her and Fin’s mother’s house. But Fin got his full 1/3 share of the sale (there is another brother in that family, and he and Fin never got along too well, Fin was rude and cruel to his younger brother for their entire lives). Finley definitely received his regular monthly share of the mortgage payments from the people who were buying his mother's house. The nephew's mother received the large mortgage checks from those people, and then she wrote personal checks to her two brothers. Fin's nephew even saw checks that had been made out and sent to Finley, had been deposited into Finley’s bank account in Maine, then cleared by his mother's bank, and returned to her. But Martha had endorsed the last year or so’s worth of them. The nephew's mother knew Marty's handwriting, because they had often done some of their school homework together as kids. Finley had gotten pissed off about something to do with the sale of the house. Maybe the price was not high enough to suit him and Marty, but Fin had definitely said, "the hell with it," and refused to sign any more checks. That's how he was. But Marty wasn't going to let that money slip by her. This info is not in here to say that this is an example of Marty's greed, she and Fin were the rightful recipients of the funds, but it shows how Fin was when he got angry and said, "the hell with it."

After Finley had gotten so overly angry that he had stopped signing the checks, Marty could easily have found opportunities to call her old friend, Fin’s sister, and talk to her now and then. Marty also could have talked to Fin about how he should calm down and take a less monetary based view of the family situation. Marty could have made those efforts, in order to try and smooth things out for the sake of the family. But money-more-money is more important to Marty, than Finley’s family is. The whole deal with the anger about the house sale has Marty’s signature all over it—not just on some of the checks. She was quite possibly even angrier than Finley was about it. She most likely had to have been prodding Fin, all along, about him supposedly not getting enough money from the sale of his mother’s house. That’s how she was with him. When the nephew had lived at the Lodge, he had seen plenty enough of that type of marital interaction between his aunt and uncle to know what it was all about. And the young guide’s mother had known it for a long time before her teenaged son had first witnessed it. Most likely, after Fin had had enough of hearing Marty tell him that he had gotten ripped off, he had said, “the hell with it,” and that he didn’t, “want any of the gahdamned money anyway, she (his sister) can shove it up her ass, as far as I’m concerned.”

After that, Finley never spoke to, or ever saw, his sister again.

It is a shame that Martha and Finley had to be so self-serving, greedy and hardheaded that they destroyed all relationships with Fin's entire family.

Marty has maintained some contact with her family. Not a lot of contact though, because they were either afraid of Finley or just can’t deal with the way that he was. That has, though, still worked out well for her, because the greedy bit-ah-whoa-uh-witch has always wanted the whole-entire substantial Fin and Marty estate to go to her family. Why? I don't know. And Fin and Marty’s family had lived next door to each other for years, in the tight-little, mill town community of Sparrows Point, Maryland. The young guide's father’s family had lived there for years too. They all knew each other well. Martha is greedy, and she has an evil streak runnin' right down through the center of her. The witch.

In 1994, this movie's main character gets sober. Stabilizes his life. Then applies for and begins to receive an SSI disability check each month. His serious and legally compressible disabilities are a combination of a bad back and a good dose of depression.

In 1998, he begins attending classes at Dundalk Community College, which just happens to have an excellent photography program. While attending that local school, he works hard to get off disability. Thanks in part to the top-notch photography instructors and photo lab aids, he begins to become the photographer whom he and most of his family and friends have known he was all along. He produces a large portfolio of his work. He learns how to use a computer. Learns how to go on the Internet. Finds out all about some of the great web sites that are from Maine, and he researches for all kinds info about the Patten, Maine area that is on the World Wide Web. He makes darn good use of the Internet. He begins to write out his stories about his experiences up at Katahdin Lodge in Patten, Maine. And then he writes some about his life as an American GI on Okinawa. The kind and generous staff at the community college writing lab coach him well.

He begins to send printed copies of the autobiographical short stories about his life in Maine to his aunt and uncle, and to various other Patten Mainers. Fin and Marty refuse to acknowledge those stories. Fortunately for their now 50 year old nephew, he is well aware of the fact that even though his aunt and uncle would most likely, angrily throw the copies that he sent to them into the trash, they would definitely hear about his stories from some of the others who had gotten copies of them too.

The first three stories he sent to them were The House Fire, The Day I Fell In Love With Patten Maine and The Rocket Scientist. Go look those writings over and you will see three very nice stories with some serious surprises contained within them. In those stories there are no criticisms, no complaints or any explanations about how he had been mistreated by Fin and Marty. He had hoped that by having his aunt and uncle read his stories that they would finally realize what he had truly been like as their nephew and employee. "The Rocket Scientist" tells of a deadly dangerous, near out of control situation that he had instinctively taken control of and safely lived through, but that he had never told anyone up in Maine about before.

When those benign, true tales failed to elicit any response at all from his aunt and uncle, he called them on the telephone. Marty answered the phone, and as soon as he identified himself to her she hung right up on him. It was time to take the kid gloves off. No more mercy. They had shown him none. Nor his parents. Not only was Finley his mother's younger brother, and Martha had been like a sister to her, his father had, for a long time, been Finley's best friend.

He begins sending hand written postcards to his aunt and uncle. He knows that they probably threw out the envelopes containing his short stories, but they can't escape seeing the words written on a postcard. After they had received his first postcard, upon receiving the next postcards they may have immediately looked away, before the written words on them could transfer from the paper and up into their heads, but it was worth a try. Among other truthful things that he writes on those 40 to 50 postcards he sends them, he tells them that they are liars and thieves. One time he went on the Internet, found a web page where he could calculate what 1969, '77, and '79 dollars equal in year 2002 money, and using that web site, he added up what he is owed by Fin and Marty; then he sent them 24 postcards with the same message written on it, more or less saying==You Owe Me, and the amount, pay me. That was 24 sent at one time, so that they would get the message for sure.

Back in the year 2000 or 2001, when he first began sending his Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley copies of his short stories about his life at Katahdin Lodge, all that those two hard heads had to do was to acknowledge the reality of what their nephew had done for them and to pay him. Then he would have moved on, while still writing his stories, but he would not have contacted them again. He was open to potential full family reconciliation, but has no real hopes for it as long as Marty is alive. She always keeps a boiling, bubbling and steaming cauldron full of anti-Finley's family feelings all stirred up and witchy-working to her advantage.

That unjustifiably withheld full acknowledgement of reality could greatly relieve the nephew of his depression. And he would use that money to put together a photography and writing office, where he can finally become his full self again. He needs a reliable motor vehicle, professional grade computer and photography equipment and an office that is furnished and set up to aid a person with degenerative back decease. Had his aunt and uncle responded to those first three true stories with true family love and concern, then their nephew could have gone on with his life and lived it well. Instead, their refusal to face the facts has plunged him even deeper into depression and despair then he already was. His life is damn near a living nightmare. It is dismal. He does write and publish stories and photographs, but he rarely ever goes anywhere or spends time with other people. He never gets paid for anything that is published, nor ever sells any photographs.

The nephew begins to submit his stories to numerous publications in Maine. After the requisite rejections, one Internet newspaper begins to publish his stories. That web site, Magic City News out of Millinocket, is the closest newspaper web site to Patten. A fair number of people up in that part of Maine, or from that part of God's Country, read his stories on Magic City News; thousands of other people from around the USA and a few from around the globe read his stories too. They enjoy reading them, and a goodly number of those kind folks send him emails telling him so.

After, the now 50-some-year-old, main character in the movie gets a few of his Maine adventures short stories pretty well completed and published, he begins to write about his US Army adventures. When the US Army had sent him to Okinawa, or as the GIs called it—The Rock—he was assigned as the 'official' photographer for the 30th Artillery Brigade. That was a missile unit with Hawk and also Nike Hercules Missiles. And some of the Nikes had nuclear warheads on them. His experiences as an Army photographer on Okinawa, during 1970-71, were in many ways typical for most American GIs over there. They were serving non-combat tours of duty, during the Vietnam War. He writes wild and crazy tales telling about spending lots of time in the bar and red light districts. His stories are historically informative about that wild nightlife scene. And then also about the way that GIs lived in their barracks, what their music listening pleasures were, their solid friendships, and how they loved being in a foreign land and getting along well with the local Asian population. He tells some very strange and funny stories about their leaders—their sergeants and officers. He also tells of exactly what it was like having the big fat Book of US Army Rules and Regulations brutally smashed down hard upon, and broken right across, his head, by the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa. His assignment as a photographer to the 30th Arty Bgde, and also the photo lab that he was forced to work in while he was assigned there, broke more rules and regulations than you could ever imagine—it was 100% illegal and militarily immoral. That was devastating to the dedicated young soldier. Still is, to some degree, today.

Eventually, the biggest and best outdoors adventure web site in the State of Maine, Maine Outdoors Today, publishes some of his stories too, and also some of his photographs. His work is well received by visitors to that web site. The editor of Maine Outdoors Today convinces him to start blogging.

With only the rudimentary computer and Internet skills of a Computer 101 community college course to go on, he begins to blog, and blog, and blog. He desperately needs his own full sized, commercial grade web site, but he is stuck with teaching himself how to turn free blogs into poor man's web sites. And it works well for him.

He blogs about Maine, and that receives great responses; he blogs about his time as a United States Army photographer on Okinawa, and that garners him a lot of emails from other Okinawa veterans; he blogs about his hometown of Dundalk, Maryland and puts many of his mighty fine photographs of that much misunderstood community on the blog; he photo blogs about the Eastern Baltimore City and County areas near where he lives at now; those Baltimore area photo blogs receive good responses; then he has another blog about dumpster diving—he is very successful at doing safe and sanitary dumpster diving.

Why is it that Finley and Martha Clarke did not take legal action against me, in order to try to stop me from sending those stories around, all over Maine, to anyone and everyone, and also for sending those postcards to them two hard heads?

{End of Section 2 of this 4-part document. Please continue on to Section 3 / Northern Maine Adventures / The Movie, the blog post below this one, the previous post. It'll be well worth your time--I swear to it! READ ON! }

{This is Section 3 of a 4-part document that is read from the top of this blog down--from the latest Northern Maine Adventures / The Movie blog post, down through the older ones; just the opposite from how blogs are normally read. I guarantee that this well written document is full of interesting, entertaining, and even shocking snippets---all the way through. I do believe that you'll enjoy this. Read on! }

I know that Fin and Marty Clarke have declared that my stories are full of lies. Somehow, their ignorant bullshit has made its way down here to my father’s side of the family, and I am pissed off about that.

Hows’ comes’ big bad, considerably wealthy and well armed—lead based and legally—Uncle Finley did not head on down the road to Maryland and get right up here in my face about it?

Why is it that they have not taken any defensive action against me?

Hmmm?

They must know that their near-impoverished nephew does not have the funds needed to properly defend himself in court, or to bring a lawsuit against them up in Maine. They must know, because they hear stuff about me the same as I hear stuff about them.

I can’t even afford to go to Maine for any fun and enjoyable reasons—and it is killing me to miss out on every beautiful fall foliage display, every Deer and Moose and Bear and bird season (no matter if I get to harvest any wild game or not, it's always well worth going hunting just for the time spent out in the woods that I love), all that fishing, them deee-lightfully attractive Maine Mommas, the snowmobile riding, the hiking, the camping, visiting with any local Mainers and fellow travelers as well, or just relaxing on the front porch of a lakeside cabin, loving life.

How about a lawsuit against my editors in Maine who publish those supposedly falsified, libelous stories on the World Wide Web?

Why have there never been any lawsuits instigated in my direction, by Fin and Marty?

My stories are true, that’s why.

Every other single individual who is featured in any of these stories and who has read them knows that they are true. And they tell some of their family and friends that this is so. Some of those individuals have emailed me and a few have spoken to me on the phone, and they tell me that the stories are as true as they can be.

Finley K. Clarke died on Thursday, April 27, 2006. There was no mention in his obituary of his side of the family—my side of the family. No mention at all. That's Marty for ya'.

If Marty were not a driving force behind the separation of Fin from his family, then she would have written about us in his obituary. Whenever Finley wasn't around, she usually did what she wanted to. That's why, in 1979, she took in far more than the twenty bear hunters per week that Fin had told her to, because Fin was not in the Lodge's office when she was taking the hunter's reservations, for week long bear hunts. And it was why, one day while Fin and I were driving out of the Lodge's driveway, Finley had stopped the truck, had turned to me, looked me straight in my eyes and said, "David, I've gotten myself into something that I can't get out of."

The obit included:

Besides his wife, Martie of Shin Pond, Finley is survived by two sisters-in-law, Mary Jane Thomas and Bette Thornton, both of Maryland; many nieces and nephews; and close friends, the Birmingham family, Chuck and Karen Chanadet, Jack Swartz, Wayne and Linda Melvin, Bob and Jeanne Smallwood, Vic Drew, The "Italians," Diane Lane with her special care and many, many more, too numerous to list. Finley loved his "Maine Family."

Reading that obituary, and not seeing Finley's natural family mentioned in it, in anyway at all, makes me feel like I have been shot at and missed, but shit at and hit.

The following sentence belongs in Finley's obituary: Finley is survived by his brother Nelson Clarke, of Maryland, and is predeceased by his sister Doris Mae Crews.

And some obituaries include info about the deceased person's parents, but not always, especially when the deceased is as old as Finley was when he passed away.

By leaving out the info about Fin's sister, brother and parents, and by strategically placing many nieces and nephews after Finley is survived by two sisters-in-law, Mary Jane Thomas and Bette Thornton, both of Maryland, then stating Finley loved his "Maine Family," it is clear to me that Martha is neither including me, my sisters or cousins in the many nieces and nephews part of this obit. She is outright implying that Finley had no love for his blood relatives at all.

I do not believe that. Because at one time, he was too close to his natural family to not always feel some love for us, for his entire life. Finley's loving feelings for his family were all messed up by his anger. My Uncle Finley was a victim of PTSD aggravated anger—extrememly intense anger that is very difficult for its bearer to control or to understand, without Veteran's Administration PTSD counseling. The VA is very good at PTSD counseling now, so if you know any vets who need that kind of help, it is available to them.

But that was a fair enough mention of his closest, long-time friends. That is good and right. The statement, his "Maine Family", is fair enough with me. They were all very close. I have no problem with some of those folks getting parts of Finley's estate—some of his guns and other things and maybe some money or some of the land holdings that he and Marty had together in their names.

John Birmingham, a member of the Birmingham family who are mentioned in the obit, is the son whom Finley never had but always wanted. John worked at the Lodge, until Martha refused to give him a raise in salary that Finley had told her to. I heard this from friends in Maine and from my parents too. John was worth every penny of what he had been paid at the Lodge, and more, but Marty would not pay him that "more." John Birmingham is about as good a woodsman as has ever lived; he is the best shot with a rifle or shotgun that anyone, whom I knew in Maine, had ever seen shoot. John was home on leave from the Army, one time, and he volunteered his guide services at the Lodge. John worked with me, and we had great times putting out bear baits together. John was a lot of fun to work with. Before that, when John was on leave a different time, while Fin and Marty were visiting family down in Maryland, and I was watching the Lodge, John and I hung out at the Lodge a lot, and we did some wild snowmobile riding together. Had John come back to work at the Lodge after his first hitch in the Regular Army was up and he had remained Fin's number one guide until Fin retired, as Fin had so desired, and Fin and Marty had paid me what I had earned, including the respect, then I would say that John should get the most out of Finley's estate. John still does deserve a nice chunk of it, but that amount has to be balanced against what is rightfully mine.

After it was clear to Fin that John was never coming back to work for him, he had hoped that I would take over the business after he had retired. He had let me know this, but I could never trust Marty in there handling the Lodge's business paperwork. She always cheated me. And Finley had, at one time, written me up in his will to receive 2/3's of his estate. But he later rewrote his will and cut me out of it, after he had committed that one final, grievous wrong against me, in 1979, when he had accidentally cut me while we were skinning a bear together, and I would not allow him to blame me for what he himself had done wrong.

But that crap about, Finley is survived by two sisters-in-law, Mary Jane Thomas and Bette Thornton, both of Maryland; many nieces and nephews, is all part of a well planned out design to exclude myself and my side of the family from getting anything of Finley's. We won't get old photos, some of which will be thrown away after Marty dies, or maybe some have already been thrown away. We won't get his war medals or any other personal mementoes. We won't get a small selection of his firearms, hunting knives or any other hunting gear. He had plenty of tools, but none are going to be set-aside for us down here in Maryland to go up and retrieve. We sure won't be given any money, land or motor vehicles, and Fin and Marty had plenty of it all. Marty has it now.

Marty's sisters, and the rest of her family, did not ever have much to do with Finley, at all. Shit! Most of those many nieces and nephews have no real idea who Finley is, or was. They'd probably have never even recognized him if he had knocked on their front door. Not only that, during the past five years or so, there was a long stretch of time when Marty and her family weren't even on speaking terms with each other, because of Finley. Someone in her family had died, and Finley had not allowed Marty to come down here, to Maryland, for the funeral. Some of Marty's family members live in my neighborhood, and I heard this directly from them.

A member of the Thomas family informed me that Mary Jane Thomas, Marty's sister Janie, is a proud lesbian who married another woman.

That's all fine with me; I accept that. I am strictly heterosexual, but that's me, not everybody.

Finley, though, oh lordy-lordy, Finley, though, had no tolerance for the homosexual lifestyle. Marty didn't used to either; she sure hated gay men, and I'd bet that she still does. She should be fully accepting of her sister Janie's sexual preference, but Janie and her wife(?)/husband(?) sure as hell were never going to visit Martha, at least not as an openly gay couple, while Finley was still alive. I don't know for certain, but it is doubtful that Janie ever was up there while Fin was alive. Janie can feel free to contact me and set me straight on whether she has ever gone to Maine to visit her sister Marty. I do not hold any animosity towards the Thomas family, but they have to understand that Marty committed grievous wrongs against me.

It is outright hogwash to imply in that obituary that Janie and Bette and the rest of the Thomas family will miss Finley. They certainly may very well be sorry for Martha's loss. No one has ever doubted that Martha and Finley truly did love one another. But most of the Thomas family members sure-as-flyin'-flip ain't gonna' be missing ol' Finley Kenneth Clarke. Not one bit.

I believe that Fin's friends deserve about a third of his and Martha's estate, and Martha's family gets a third, and my side of the family gets a third.

But I say that until all that I am owed, by Finley K. and Martha Clarke, is dispersed to me, nobody gets a thing.

And fuck anybody who views things differently.

If I had ever possessed the funds necessary to take my Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley to court, I would have done so a long time ago. Now the stakes are much higher. If there is ever anyway for me to afford to bring a lawsuit against Martha Clarke, alive or dead, I will.

Unfortunately for the main character in the film, as he ages up and past 50 years old, his disabilities gradually worsen. Consequently, he cannot get a photography business going. He remains unemployable and has no money coming in from his photographic or written work. He has to accept his fate, so he applied for and now receives a small, monthly, non-service connected disability check from the Veterans Administration. To receive such a regular disbursement, a veteran must be totally and permanently disabled for life.

He is fully, painfully aware though, that his screwed up military experiences warrant him a 70 to 100% service connected disability rating. He applies for it several times, is given the royal run around by Veterans Administration doctors, and is denied his benefits. But he is determined to continue fighting for those completely well deserved benefits, that which are immediately due.

Based upon his own VA Hospital inpatient experiences, during 90 days worth of alcohol and drug rehab stays plus a total of 5 1/2 months in VA Hospitals due to his degenerative back disease, he writes three, very well-done articles about how more than eighteen of our country’s Veterans Administration Medical Center properties are immorally being leased out to private developers and being turned into condominium complexes (for vets and non-vets alike), and/or turned into anything else but better veteran’s health care facilities. State of the art medical facilities that we veterans and our families desperately need. Those three articles inform the veteran’s rights protection world about what is happening, and many of the individual peoples and veteran’s groups who are active in that world take action to try to save their local VAMCs for veteran’s health care only. His articles are either republished on or linked to from every kind of veteran’s issues oriented web site imaginable. From far right wing, old hard charging veteran's web sites, to a Department of Defense web site, and all the way over to the far left—where the anti-US Guv’ment ranters and ravers dwell.

The combined successes of all of his published written works gave him what he had, for a very long time, needed to be able to write important letters to the local newspaper editor. And those writings were published in that newspaper.

He currently lives a rather dismal, reclusive life. Can’t afford a motor vehicle. He rarely ever goes anywhere farther than a half mile from his home. Never got married or had children. Hardly has contact with any of his family, except for his very young grandnephew. And his primary means of communication with the rest of the world is through the Internet.

His work receives very little, to no, attention or respect from his family. He has tried and tried to convince most of his family members to read, view and enjoy his World Wide Web published works, but most of them simply ignore him.

Most of his old friends are all either dead, burnt out on alcohol and/or other drugs, or are off somewhere successfully living their own lives. He sees a few of them now and then, is relieved to be able to tell those old friends about his success on the Internet, but they hardly ever go look at his well published work.

There are many people whom he has never met in person who have emailed him and told him how much they enjoy and appreciate his work, but that's about it for any complimentary, positive feedback he receives.

Even though he has achieved significant portions of his life's goals, he does not actually fee like anybody or anything. He has reached his goals of having some of his short stories nearly all the way written out, published, and then read by thousands of people; he has achieved some of his goals of having his photography published, viewed and greatly appreciated by thousands of people; he has always needed to have his true explanations of just what really did happen up there in Maine and over in Okinawa published where all the world could see them; another goal that, for many years, he so desired to achieve and has finally achieved is to be able to write comprehensive and effective articles about veterans affairs and also community issues. Of all of those thousands of people who have read and/or viewed his published works, only a very few are his family members or his friends. He himself has no real idea who writes his stories or produces those wonderful photographs or who it is that builds his blogs. He very rarely connects in any way to that part of his personality. When he receives any, of the numerous enough, positive comments from strangers about his work, any resulting self-satisfaction or any pride that he ever feels, well, unfortunately for all, those good healthy inner feelings are fleeting, to say the least. Generally speaking, he has no idea that he even walks around in that prolific and proficient writer, photographer and blogger's skin.

He is far too deeply humiliated by his living conditions, his poverty and lack of professional success as a photographer and writer to be going out in public very often.

But he is fairly well known, somewhat popular, and much appreciated on the World Wide Web.

Though the main character has no children of his own, when his grandnephew lost his father in a road accident, the little boy's great-uncle (the main character) took over as the male authority figure in the life of the fully deserving young child. The child has no uncles, and the grandfathers are irresponsible, flaming assholes who refuse to have anything to do with the child, so the next in natural line of family responsibility is the child’s great-uncle. The great-uncle has never regretted a moment of shouldering that responsibility. He loves all that it entails.

The boy is a lot like his great-uncle. And those two guys are the best of friends who enjoy the outdoors together at every chance they can get. They teach each other plenty about how to live good lives. They love each other dearly. The great-uncle sacrifices anything he has to in order to help raise the child. The child adores his uncle. So much so that his uncle lovingly gives the little boy the Indian style nickname, "Little Shadow".

One thing that I have often thought about is, what angle do we tell this movie's story from?

Should it simply be a “period piece” that starts at the beginning, stays in the 1969 era, and goes to where ever it ends?

The main character did go back to try and work at the Lodge in 1977 and ’79, so it could be told from that more matured view of the main character. He could be there for that two and a half weeks in ’79 and seeing things around him and talking to people and all of that can trigger specific memories of 1969, and then the film pans back to that time. It was in 1979 when his uncle blamed him that one final time for something Finley himself had done wrong to him; then, the nephew being steeped in his resulting, exploding, justifiable anger, he saw strange things floating through the air, and he walked off down the road to keep from throwing the chair that he was sitting in through the window and beating the crap out of that sum-beechie uncle of his. Which was better than his first thoughts of cramming a loaded shotgun up under Finley’s chin. This part is already written out in my story, Then They Own You.

I was in two different Veterans Administration alcohol/drug rehabs. Though my problem is mainly the booze, I had to put up with a bunch of jive-ass junkies in the first rehab. It damn near ended as a running battle between them and me, and I won.

While there in those rehabs, I thought about how the main character in this movie could begin to tell his story to a councilor, a group meeting, or to a good buddy in there. Maybe he could tell part of his story to someone else, then just be shown thinking through his memories of Maine as the film moves into the flashback stage.

He could very effectively be shown in a depressed state of mind going over his past in his head, while in any number of different locations.

The plot could be written from when he has no warm place to stay and is sleeping in his best friend’s unheated garage loft, nearly freezing to death and wondering how his life had gone that way.

What about having him telling his grandnephew stories about the photographs of his Northern Maine Adventures that are hung up on the main character's living room wall? Or talking to the child about the same ones that are on his blog?

Yeah, that is good, a totally 21st Century way of telling the story. Have him telling his grandnephew some of the story while they are looking at the blog together. Then, after his grandnephew goes to bed, or gets bored with looking at photos and hearing old stories told, like kids do, and goes back to playing with the toys on the floor, have the main character begin going over certain parts of the story in his own head, pan to flashback. Make it a full weekend with them two together and spread the parts of the Maine story out between brief, gentle scenes of his life today. This is an excellent way to have that nice ending that American moviegoers always want to see.

Yes, America loves a winner—a nice ending to every story. How else can that come about? By showing the main character as part the movie making process? By showing how he is living after he gets paid some of his money for his story? Ayy?

Will he narrate the story? Narrate from what age and from where?

Or just have him begin telling it to someone, anyone, then let the flashbacks take over.

His story could be told from that courtroom where he has always wanted to confront his Uncle Finley and Aunt Martha on even ground. That could work out well. More ways for the filmmakers to portray drama and emotion, comedy and errors, that’s for sure.

These are all excellent ideas for the scriptwriters to work with. Or, one or more of the writers or someone else may come up with a different and more effective angle to tell the story from.

After I was worked over all mean and nasty by Fin and Marty, and I enlisted into the United States Army and was sent to Okinawa, I ended up in an even more screwed up situation over there—that is all completely laid out, for the entire world to see, on my two blogs, 30th Artillery Brigade Okinawa 1970-71 and An American GI On Okinawa 1970-71.” The Fin and Marty experiences caused me to loose faith in my family, and then the 30th Arty Bgde experiences caused me to loose belief in my country. Consequently, by the time that I was 21 years old, I had pretty well lost any sense of family and country. The deeply painful combination of those two separate sets of fucked up experiences hit me with a one-two punch that damn near knocked me out of myself completely, and the rug was pulled right out from under my feet. I fell hard.

For a long time after that, I wasn't much good for anything useful.

After my honorable discharge from the US Army, in November of 1971, all that I have ever wanted to work as is a professional outdoorsman, photographer and writer. Not only had I had earned the right to do so, there has always been plenty of room within these combined professions for me to have worked hard and been successful at them, in every possible way. When I became an accomplished professional outdoorsman, then when I also became a US Army trained photographer, a very good photographer with a natural eye for capturing great images in photographs—no one can teach a person that natural quality of a good photographer, because it must come from within you—once I had become that outdoorsman and photographer, I was never able to be anyone else.

After my military discharge, in order for me to remain being that person meant that I must continue doing most of the exact same things that had more or less cost me my family and my country. You may not understand this, but for the following 28 years, I was rarely ever able to work at what I was best at, within the chosen professions that I had fully earned the rights to work in, because I could not find anything much left to work for. Though that was an unhealthy reaction, which made an extremely bad situation much worse, very rarely does a person ever want to walk right back up a trail where they had just been viciously mauled by two Tasmanian Devils, then robbed by bandits.

Severe depression caused by that set of experiences still dogs me to this day.

I do have to take responsibly, though, for the fact that when I more or less crawled off of that trail and on into the underbrush, to try and figure out how to recover from those deep wounds caused by my devastating losses of family and country, I drank too much booze. I must take responsibility for any bad effects that I, and others around me, suffered through when I was heavily abusing alcohol.

My spending so much time getting drunk and emotionally numb was no way to solve any of my problems. I apologize for doing that, and for all that I did that was wrong.

Up until my last gulp of ethyl alcohol, in 1994, I had gotten sober a number of times. Then relapsed.

Whenever I got sober, one remaining problem always was, though, each time that I got the soul and psyche anesthetizing booze flushed out of me real good and clean, and the low hanging clouds of fog cleared out from in front of my eyes, about all that I could see and feel was that I still had no returning sense of family and country.

But when I was a growing American boy, family, country, American style freedom and the higher power of yours or my choice was all that I had ever believed in. Family, country and freedom—including our God given freedom of religion—have always been and always will be our most valuable treasures. I have always been and always will be most willing to love, nurture, defend and to work, sacrifice, fight, kill and die for those principles. The sum total of my work that is now published on the World Wide Web provides full testament to this.

Telling the world about the personal frailties and vulnerabilities that allowed me to become so severely depressed by what had happened to me while in Maine and then on Okinawa, to have to inform you here that most of my adult life has been lived all down and out and out of touch with the rest of society then barely back on my feet again, is excruciating for me. But telling about these things is only fair for your well-balanced consideration of who I am and for you to be able to decide if you are willing to work with me on this movie project.

Now I am back on my feet again. Barely so. But fighting back with all of the inner strength I can muster. Fighting fair but hard, by continuously working for long hours on my Internet projects and struggling to survive on a day-to-day basis. It is a decidedly dismal life I am living through today, but you could never know that this is so by looking at my photographic and written works that are published in numerous places on the World Wide Web.

All of what has been written about on here will provide a lot of challenging and rewarding work for screenwriters, directors, a casting agency, set designers, set builders, cinematographers, various technicians, costume designers, makeup artists, caterers, security personnel and everyone else who is needed for the movie, which includes me.

Besides working with and advising the scriptwriters, location scouts, director and cinematographers, one job that I shall be performing myself is, I will be taking candid photos of the film production team and anyone else who happens to be on the movie sets. And there will be copies of my photos given out amongst them all, for them to keep for themselves or to give to their family or friends. This is the one type of photography that I do about as well as has ever been done, or ever will be done. I love capturing complimentary photographic images of people being themselves, whether hard at work or hard at play, or just taking a relaxing break from their hard work or play and socializing with others. Like a big ol' Owl studying the forest floor for the most opportune moment to swoop down upon its intended prey, I have a keen eye for determining the exact instant when all of my intended photographic subjects are looking good for a photograph. During those, rather thrilling, times, a photographer has to sorta' blend into their surroundings, to clandestinely disappear from the conciseness of their intended subjects; the photographer must to stay alert, and also already be agile, swift and skilled at using their camera gear, in order to be able to capture a great photographic image of all of the individuals, in any given group of people, looking good at the same exact moment. I was well known for fully mastering that photographic technique, in 1970, when I was performing my military photographer duties at US Army social events.

This movie definitely should be made somewhere in Northern Maine. The Patten area itself may not be the right place for filming it, and that is to be decided later. There are far to many unknown and fully expected variables when choosing the best locations for filming in. All filmmakers will know this.

During the times when some of the cast and crew will be working on movie sets somewhere up in Maine, those individuals will be spending a lot of time with the local Maine population there. That interaction will greatly add to any ideas that they have for the film. There will be some local Maine folks working in various capacities on the movie sets, hanging out behind the scenes, and sitting around eating the catered food. At times, non-Mainer members of the cast and crew will be eating in the small restaurants up there, shopping in the stores, carousing in the pubs, and going hiking, fishing, hunting, snowmobile riding, off road four wheeler riding, mountain biking, road biking, motorcycling, taking scenic auto tours through the countryside, canoeing, boating, dating and 'you name it', the film crew will be doing it with local Mainers as their trusty companions. The entire time that those social interactions are taking place, there will be optimum opportunity for the cast and crew to learn more about those wonderful folks in Maine—and to be able to portray them Mainers much more realistically on film. Ya' simply can't be around a bunch of 'um for very long without hearing some really cool stories, told well. Some Mainers' conversation casually overheard by a cast member or a scriptwriter could become the basis for a great scene in the movie.

We could hold an informal competition to see which Mainers can tell the most entertaining and outlandish tall tales for use in the movie; for like when the young nephew is hanging out with some local folks. The Mainers who get their tales written into the script get paid for their stories. Every entry would win something, like having some of our most famous movie stars there for a casual, pleasant autograph signing and photograph taking session. The Maine folks can bring their own little personal cameras. I can take lots of digital, pro quality informal shots of the whole get together. Then we could either print up mighty fine photos right then and there, or give out digital copies on inexpensive CD disks, or email them to the recipient of the Mainer's choice. I'd, friggin' aye right, enjoy that immensely.

If any of this movie is filmed in the Patten, Maine area, then that will bring in good monies to good folks living there. No matter where the movie is filmed, for years to come Patten will be more popular with money spending tourists. This movie will provide a considerable boost to the ailing local economy of Patten, Maine.

Fin and Marty sold Katahdin Lodge years ago. I have had some contact with the new owners. They may very well be willing to allow the Lodge to be used during the filming of this movie. And that place has plenty of room for a large film crew to stay there in comfort. And that crew's free time outdoors activates potentials are simply awesome there. Yeah!!

I will not compromise on the quality of anything that this movie needs for it to be well written, beautifully filmed, entertaining, exciting, memorable, popular with audiences for generations to come, financially successful and a credit to the good folks up in Maine. If you are not interested in working in accordance to those standards, do not contact me.

This story equates to my life's savings. I need the money that I will earn from it as soon as possible. If you are not prepared to aid me in gaining immediate financial wealth and security and if you do not expect me to earn every penny of it as a member of the film production team, then I do hope that when this film is released you will enjoy going to see it even more because you read this today.

You have no idea how pleased and grateful I will be if this film project leads to me getting off of disability pension. I may never be able to work on any more movies after this one, but the money that I will make off of this one will save my life and change it for the better. I will then possess the funds that I desperately need to properly furnish, equip and adapt a photography and writing office so that everything about it prevents and relieves my constant spinal discomfort. I can make regular visits to physical therapists. I can finally go to a Chiropractor and also to afford therapeutic massages. I can hire helpers and personal aides. And I do believe that my depression will subside and quit dog'n me so severely, after all of these positive changes come into my life.

{End of Section 3 of this 4-part document. Please continue on to Section 3, of Northern Maine Adventures / The Movie, in the blog post below this one, the previous post. It'll be well worth your time--I swear to it! READ ON! }

{This is Section 4 of a 4-part document that is read from the top of this blog down--from the latest Northern Maine Adventures / The Movie blog post down through the older ones; just the opposite from how blogs are normally read. I guarantee that this well written document is full of interesting, entertaining, and even shocking snippets---all the way through. I do believe that you'll enjoy this. read on! }

The following was added on September 25, 2007 at 3:56 AM

I am bankrupt in just about everyway possible. Each month, I rely on local food banks to survive. I no longer possess camera equipment. I need to have my personally done, custom hand printed photographs professionally matted, mounted and framed. They cannot be displayed in a gallery without that. In 2002, I had to turn down one offer for a personal showing at a local gallery, and there would be other's who would be pleased to have my work displayed on their walls. I have several hundred unused negatives to work with, which, to an old pro like me, means that there are a couple of dozen portfolio quality photos waiting there for me to print. I have so many more photographs planned out that I want to take that it's nearly killing me not being able to. Everyday, I miss great opportunities for doing more outstanding photography. I need top of the line, professional computer equipment and software. I already have displayed, on the World Wide Web, beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am talented and I am self-driven towards hard work and success. It takes money to make money. Once I begin receiving profits from this film project, I will be able to work harder everyday.

I also need the monies owed to me by my aunt and uncle, and the monies from my long overdue military service connected disability rating.

I have done everything that I am supposed to do in order to prove the facts about what happened to me up in Maine, and also what it was that happened to me in the US Army on Okinawa. And, yet, another poor excuse for a Veterans Administration doctor, Dr. Jacob (Jackass) Tendler, has declared that all I say about my service on Okinawa is lies. My Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley have always declared that I am thoroughly lying about what happened between us in Maine, and the Army and the Veteran's Administration have refused to believe anything that I say about my being illegally assigned as an official photographer for the 30th Artillery Brigade. Finley is dead, and Martha is dying fast. I say that a large chunk of the sizable Finley Kenneth Clarke estate, that Fin left to Marty, and that Marty is keeping from my side of the family, is mine. The United States Army owes me an apology, and the Veterans Administration owes me a lot of money. Because of those two devastating losses, I live a miserable life.

The money from either one of those debts owed to me could get me what I need to recover the other. The money from the movie would allot me the working capital to take care of both problems.

I have located two 30th Arty Bgde veterans who are witnesses, reluctant witnesses, who can testify that when I was working as an Army photographer on Okinawa, I could neither order equipment nor supplies, that there was no slot for a photographer in the 30th, so I could never advance in rank, and that the photo lab had indeed been illegally and immorally set up in a nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber. They are each written about on my blog, 30th Artillery Brigade Okinawa 1970-71. And they know it. They are T. Gordon Barber and Jim Whitcomb. I found Whitcomb through an Internet search for 30th Arty Bgde photographers, and Barber found me through my web published 30th Arty writings and emailed me. I have exchanged emails with Barber, and one time I talked to Jim, on the phone, for over an hour last year. Since then, I have emailed each of them several times, but they do not reply. While on the phone to Jim Whitcomb, he verified to me that he remembers well that all that I say and write about concerning these military matters is true. At the time of that phone conversation, he had no idea what it has meant to my empty life, my lost family, my long gone friends, and me. Both of those witnesses do know it now, but they are not cooperating.

The money owed to me from Fin and Marty is enough for me to do what I legally need to do in order to take care of unresolved military/Veterans Administration related issues. Had the monies owed to me by the Veterans Administration come, when I had proven my service connected disability case to them, it would have been enough and in time for me to have gone to Maine, while my uncle was still living, and remedied the situation with Fin and Marty.

Monies from this movie project will be enough for me to take care of both of those long-term problems.

I have been working on this synopsis for eight days straight, during most of my waking hours. And when I am trying to go to sleep I have to sit up now and then to write down notes of what I just thought about to write out on the computer in the morning. This started out as, "Ten Reasons Why My Northern Maine Adventures Will Make A Great Movie." Now it has a life of its own, and it keeps growing.

Yesterday evening, I was walking up to the shopping center, which is two blocks away from my home, to buy a sandwich, when I heard what sounded like a gun being fired from around the corner of the large building that I was walking next to, on the sidewalk. Then two 13 to 14 year old boys, on one small bicycle, came rolling by from behind me there on the street, and they slowly moved past me. I heard another gunfire-like popping sound and turned around to see another 13 to 14 year old boy on a bike slowly rolling towards my way. I was getting a little scared, but hoping that the pistol popping type of sounds that I was hearing coming from behind, and now also to the far side of that third kid, were from some of those little Snappers that kids throw against the pavement to explode. I was actually afraid to turn back around and look to see if I could see what I did not want to see—a pistol in the third kid's hand. The first two kids slowed down, and one said to the third kid, "Give that guy some. Hey, give that guy some." As the kid spoke those words, he was grinning like the smartass little piece of crap that he turned out to be, and he was pointing his finger at me. I was the only other person out on that side street. As the third kid came up next to me there, about thirty feet away, he pointed a pistol at me, from his waist level, where the gun was being held slightly hidden under his overhanging shirttail. I heard a pop and saw this little puff of white smoke blow out the end of the pistol barrel, right towards my midsection.

I immediately looked down all over at my body to see where I had been shot. I become overwhelmed with an instant, terrifying rush of fear. I also instantly expected my fatally injured body to begin crumbling down onto the pavement, and begin dying. Fortunately, I only thought that I had just been shot and murdered. I don't know whether it was a real pistol that was loaded with blanks, or a loud CO2 pistol, but it made me believe for the longest short eternity that I have ever lived through that I had been murdered.

When I was serving in the US Army, on Okinawa, an Army buddy of mine, a Vietnam combat veteran who had only been out of Vietnam and on Okinawa for a short time, told a group of us guys who were drinking a case of beer together with him, "If you're ever in combat, or if anybody ever shoots at you, back home, always check yourself over real quick to see if you've been hit. I always do, because you don't always feel it when you get hit. Sometimes it burns and hurts like hell, other times you don't feel a thing. Always check yourself for wounds."

When that punk, in Dundalk Shopping Center, pulled that trigger, if he'd a had that gahdamned gun crammed right up in close to my midsection, I would have had no way of realizing that I was not actually being shot. When I saw the end of that gun barrel pointed right at the very vulnerable center mass of my body, had that kid with the gun been close enough for me to have reached out and grabbed him, I would have had no other reasonable choice but to hurt him badly. I know a little about self-defensive movements, just a little, but enough to have had him, or even a much larger aggressor, on the ground and disabled in an instant. Had he wheeled over closer to me, or had he been on foot and had walked right up to me, and pointed that pistol and popped off that round of lead free air in towards my gut, I would not have had the time to realize that I had not been shot before I would have taken the initiative to prevent him pulling that trigger again. In order to prevent him from pulling the trigger more times, I literally could have been forced to seriously injure him, and to quite possibly severely maim him for the rest of his life, in self-defense. Now how in the hell was I supposed to deal with the knowledge that I had been forced to critically injure a kid?

Had that incident with those three punks occurred in closer quarters, with the shooter so close to me that I could have grabbed a hold of him before I realized that there were no murderous bullets being fired into me, well now, we all best thank the Saint of Circumstance, that it had not gone down that way.

That crime against my person happened in Baltimore County, Maryland, and within about a 1/4 of a mile from the Baltimore City line. Baltimore! Ten times the national average murder rate. Baltimore, Maryland. Bodymore, Murderland!

I know that those kinds of punk kids who shot that gun at me have more and easier access to guns than most adults around here do. Just about everybody around here is aware of that!

Being shot at was terrifying! But there mere fact that a kid that age was in possession of a pistol was not that much of a surprise to me, at all. You can expect that here now. In and around Baltimore, you can rightly fear that you will encounter a punk kid with a pistol. Up until around five years ago, it wasn't that way in these Dundalk suburbs, but the neighborhood here has changed.

Two of those punks on bikes were white, and one was black; a white kid had the gun, and the other white boy was the one who sicked his sick little white buddy on me. Some of the kids around here emulate the inner city thug lifestyle, the thug ways of talking and walking, and the gangland/street-corner-drug-dealer clothing styles. The kid with the gun had an oversized shirt on, that is perfectly designed for concealing the shape of a gun that is stuffed down into a person's pants. These kids listen to thug music—music that worships violence. Thug mentality has spread like a social plague all throughout our local young people here, and is influencing them in all of the wrong ways, turning them into thugs, or just lame little thug wanna'bees.

Then add the violent video games, which these kids play, into the mix of bad influences. Then the violence in the movies that they watch, over and over again. They witness many acts of faked or real violent behavior on TV, everyday. Parental Guidance Warnings on video games, music CDs, recorded movies, and TV shows do no good for children whose parents provide little, to no, guidance to their offspring.

If you go to my blog, "Blue Skies Over Dundalk Maryland" you will see plenty of good and beautiful in my neighborhood. But I am an outdoorsman who needs plenty of deep forest near his home. I gotta get outa here.

So anyways, after I realized that I had not been shot, my terror was replaced with instant, overpowering rage. I flipped-the-fuck-out on them punks. I can't really run anymore, so I couldn't go after the little punk who had the fired gun. I can't afford to own a cell phone, to have called the police with. So all that I could do was to let loose with a loud, angry string of extremely furious cursing and swearing at those punks. Anytime that I walk anywhere near a group of those kinds of kids, they are liable to be talking like that too, and sometimes they have parents who talk like that to them, so don't give me any grief about it.

What'd ya' say? Did you just say that I am supposed to be the reasonable, decent acting, clear thinking adult here? Right? Screw you. I was too pissed off to think straight. You do understand that I believed, ever so briefly, but powerfully so, you do understand that, for over a full second, I had believed that one of them had just shot me with a gun and had possibly murdered me, and that they all three of them were thrilled to see it happen? Right!

Unfortunately, that act of emotional violence that they had committed against my person was probably only just a substantial part of the beginning for them three. They won't stop indulging into that senseless garbage until they are somehow made to, or they get put in prison or killed by the police because of it.

After that lead-free pistol shot rang out, as the three little thug wanna'bees slowly pedaled on, they were loudly laughing, grinning broadly, evilly, and yelling curse words at me all the way—with pure, self-satisfactory pleasure written all over them.

If I could have gotten my hands on that punk with the pistol, well, you can imagine what I would have done, and how it would have played out in a courtroom.

As I walked along the sidewalk cussing and screaming at the top of my lungs at those smiling and laughing little punks, I knew that, because I am so deeply sunk down into poverty, that I have no money to defend myself in court with. I usually don't even have the money for taxi fare to the county court house.

I can't take this any longer.

I went on up the street and bought my sandwich. But instead of eating it in the café there as I had planned, I was still raging inside, far too intently, so I took my food home to eat it. I thought that I might be having a heart attack or a stroke, so I looked up the symptoms for each, on the Internet. All that I could think off was that the discomfort was only from stress, and would subside without killing me. I was more fearful of calling the Ambulance, and then later on having to take a bus home at 3AM, than I was of dying at home last night. A Baltimore bus at 3AM? Screw that. I don't have any money for a taxi. If I wasn't having a heart attack or a stroke, I don't have anyone whom I could have called, in the middle of the night, to come get me from the hospital. I couldn't deal with going out of my house to go be in the hospital, either. I couldn't stand the thought of being in the hospital over night, so that tests could be done on me. I chose to stay here and whatever was going to happen was going to happen.

Now I have to worry that every time that I am walking around outside in my neighborhood here, those punks will come rolling on by me again, or walk up to me, then begin to belligerently and mercilessly harass me, come real close to me, threaten to physically assault me, and I will get my hands on them. It is very difficult for a person not to always feel some residual anger towards their once perceived, cold-blooded murderers. For as long as any victim of a once perceived murder lives, they will most likely retain some of the resulting, raging anger that an assault like that instills in a person. Mine sure as hell hasn't subsided very much. Though I only felt those horribly intense, gut-smashing feelings of being murdered for a second or so, the anger at my attackers remains.

Those three boys are punks with piss-ass parents who don't raise them right. Parents who are probably used to trouble; they probably are trouble themselves; and they may be used going to court, every few years or so. They may very well be family neglecting, abusive drug addicts and/or drunks. And them three boys have plenty of punk-ass friends who would all cop the attitude that those three little idiots were just playing around, and that I did not actually get shot, so what's the problem? They can do what they want to whomever they want to. They're bad-asses. But if I booted them three punks' butts around some, they would be portrayed in court, and in the media, as innocent, harmless little children. (He's a good kid, would do anything to help anybody, he was just playin' around. He didn't do anything bad to that big, mean old man.) If I see them again, they will harass me. If I ever encounter them within a larger group of teenagers together, they will jump me. During the past couple of years, there have been several older men jumped, by punks like them, up in our small, local parks here. Those little felons have no respect for anyone else, at all.

Last night, I lost all patience with the rest of the world. No, my patience had been worn down to next to nothing; then those three little punks destroyed the rest of it

My life is a mess. My home is the kind of a jumbled up mess inside that I never imagined it could be. Due to degenerative back disease, I can't hardly bend down to pick up stuff off the floor, and I can't clean up around here as well as I used to. The depression has also painfully restricted my daily activities. Physical and emotional pain has nearly ruined my life. To top it all of with, the telephone company has a very loud, piercing signal they send out to people who dial a number wrong, in a certain way, and that screaming damned signal pushed my Tinitus right up past tolerable, but my primary care Veterans Administration doctor refused to send me to a hearing loss specialist. The ringing in my ears is LOUD.

For the past decade or so, I have been gathering up items such as tools and other home-fix-it-shop supplies, from the many dumpster dived garage cleanouts that I run into. I have antiques and collectables and plenty of other goodies from dumpster diving; including a Skunk fur jacket, in perfect shape, that I want to sell. I have numerous items for using around the nice sized, single home that I was going to purchase and move into, when my service connected disability checks and the money that Fin and Marty owe me came in. But for now, this stuff that is intended for use in that larger home is piled up all around me—in this smaller sized, low rent townhouse. And I can't take the losses of getting rid of it. I worked as hard as I could to get this stuff. I could stock a nice sized booth at an antiques mall with what I have here, and still keep a few tools and antiques and collectables for myself. I don't have the working capital and the rest of the where-with-all to be able to stock that antique mall both, or to sell some of it on EBAY. This is frustrating and demoralizing.

In the past few years, I have had to pay to have several of my teeth pulled. And there is another tooth that is going to need to be removed, sometime soon. Two years ago, I was ripped off badly by an auto mechanic, so my little truck broke down again, and I could not afford any more money to fix it. I contacted the proper authorities about it, but they did nothing to help me resolve the issue. Then they said I have to sue the crooked mechanic. That truck was then sold for a measly $50. Without that truck, I had no reliable way to get to court for any lawsuit that I could have brought against that mechanic. Due to the costs of the dental work and the mechanical work, I had to pawn my camera gear to survive. Since then, I have never gotten that well earned, much deserved break from my poverty that I have been struggling steadily for, ever since 1998. I have never given up hope for being paid for some of my photographic or written work. So I kept paying monthly pawnshop interest rates, until I could no longer do that, and I lost my camera gear. Now to pay for that next tooth extraction, I expect to loose my stereo equipment. And I cannot replace my reading glasses or anything else of any value—like my TV set—that gets lost, gets stolen, is broken, or stops working. My computer is scrapped together from dumpster dived and donated parts, it is old and barely makes it on this Internet.

If I do not take care of this well stated Maine, and also the military/Veterans Administration business within a very short period of time, I can't survive. Because surviving without collecting those two debts owed to me, or without selling my story and turning it into a good movie, means selling off almost everything that I own.

Then what?

An empty heart, barely beating inside of a worn down, constantly pained body, a heart surrounded by an ailing soul that is fiercely struggling to survive, that is inside of a person who dwells in a nearly lifeless home. A person who is wracked with tremendous anger aimed at their debtors—anger eating away at their insides. That nearly empty person receives harassing daily phone calls from the entities that they owe money to. How can I pay my debts if I can't collect the ones owed to me? Hardly anyone else besides a few entities I owe money to call me on the phone, and it rings several times a day. Good thing I was given a used phone with an answering machine to screen my calls. I only talk on the phone an average of 2 or 3 times a week, and usually for very short lengths of time. But the worst part of this bummer here is that as a 100% disabled person living on a tiny pension, I am supposed to be relieved of my largest debt, federally backed college loans. But those debt collectors did not accept, as true and legal, the information on the form that my Veterans Administration doctor filled out and signed for them, the form that declares me to be 100% disabled for life. For some reason, one friggin' asswipe US Government agency does not accept the legal word of another.

I am stuck here in this small, messy home, without benefit of the protections of many of my rights, here in this grossly limited, lousy life, with no hope for the future, outside of the hope that this future movie project allots to me. And with no way to go where the movie makers are, to be able to approach them with the full, detailed information about this project, that is presented here within this synopsis.

How long could you last like that?

If you have not yet gone over to the site that has the set of great photographs about my Maine adventures on it, then now is the time do so. These photos will definitely aid you in visualizing this future movie.

All of this together, all that is written in this synopsis here, the stories, the photographs, and the other blogs of mine that are published on the World Wide Web, all provides you with more than enough to convince you that this will be made into a good movie someday. If it does not convince you, then you are not right for this project. In that case, I do hope that you got something good out of reading this. It was my pleasure.

Thank you for reading this. I hope that you at least found it to be thoroughly entertaining.

{End of section 4 of a 4-part document. If you didn't start reading this document at its beginning, please go to Section 1 / Northern Maine Adventures / The Movie from there. It'll be well worth your time--I swear to it! }