but with many small and green potatoes strewn about. I
told Dan it smelled a bit like a musty basement. It was a
familiar scent to him. He even said, if he was blindfolded
and dropped in a northern Maine potato field, he would
know, from the smell alone, where he was standing. Now I
also know that smell.
We also felt a brisk wind while at the launch site
of the Double Eagle II. In the summer of 1978, three
adventurous men took off in a helium balloon from the
open field. It became the first successful trans-atlantic
crossing of its kind. We felt the incessant wind, yet again,
at Echo Lake. Here, Dan’s father first launched the fourteen
foot Starcraft boat he bought out on the road to Caribou.
For years, the family used it on nearby Portage and Squa
Pan Lakes.
Later that same afternoon, while coasting along
Route 10, the russet, gold and cherry red leaves, buttressed
by lanky, deep green firs, filled the rolling hills behind some
of the fields. Other fields seemed to go on forever. I told
Dan how much I too loved the feel of the open vista. It
was here I really saw how spending his formative years in
Aroostook County had made a lasting impact on Dan,
from his love of fields and open space to his enjoyment of
mowing our small hay field back home with his John Deere
tractor.
Completing Dan’s memory-jogging tour of Presque
Isle, we drove back to Stewart’s Farm to buy some Shepody
potatoes. A worker there told us that way behind the barn
were some fields still picked by hand. But, pickers weren’t
working that day. The fields were too wet. One tractor had
been pulled out of the muck, she said.
While at Stewart’s, Dan happened to peek into
a side room when a spontaneous reaction caused him to
say, “I’ve been in this room before.” It was the smell of the
stoked-up woodstove that unleashed the vivid memory of
the time he had picked potatoes at that farm. The same
woman said that the stove used to be in a shanty next door,
but they had moved it into this room. The room’s smell
had reminded Dan of potato picking on many rainy days,
when his gloves would become clumped with muddy soil.
He and his friends used to go inside to get warm. It was
clear Dan loved picking just the same on those days, as he
did those times he drove the tractor of his friend’s father on
a clear day. As he remembers it, they were all good days.
Kathleen Fortin received a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from
Dartmouth College. Concentrating in creative writing during her
studies, she focused on nonfiction narrative, personal essay and oral
history. Her graduate thesis was an oral history of the MacDowell
Colony, a one hundred year old artists’ residence colony located
in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Kathy is a freelance writer and
continues her long time career in the legal field.
56 No Ordinary Place WINTER 2011