#jim krosschell

[heartsoundslikelove]

Announcing a Book Launch for Man Afield by Jim Krosschell

We are celebrating the release of “Man Afield” by Jim Krosschell with a Book Launch. Sunday, March 29 at 1 p.m. EST we will gather virtually on Zoom with family and friends. All you have to do is REGISTER HERE and join us on Sunday.

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[heartsoundslikelove]

New Release! "Man Afield" by Jim Krosschell

We are pleased to announce the New Release of Man Afield by Jim Krosschell. Jim Krosschell has published poems and essays in some 85 journals, plus two essay collections: One Man’s Maine, which won a Maine Literary Award, and Owls Head Revisited. He lives in Deer Isle, ME and Newton, MA, and volunteers on Boards for Coastal Mountains Land Trust and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. His…

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[eunoiareview]

Across the Seas

Every morning he looks east, in love. He wants to meet them where they are. To visit one, he hops aboard a crow and flies low some 20 miles across the bay calm here in its northern reaches over islands, a peninsula or two and settles on the railing of her deck high above the gentle surf, as if birdsight is required to understand her passion for the moss, the owl, the loneliness of scented…

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[prose-theleopardseal-blog]

INGRAHAM’S HILL

NONFICTION By:  Jim Krosschell

The highest point in the town of Owls Head, Maine is Ingraham’s Hill, which, at only 200 feet above sea level, isn't saying much. But it gains most of that elevation somewhat abruptly, between the ocean shore and Route 73, making it a headland and a beacon. I assume Native Americans used it so, for millennia, as they fished the waters of Penobscot Bay. I know the Europeans did, starting with that day in 1605 that brought the adventurer Champlain, the first of the culprits, to Owls Head. He didn’t stay around to exploit anybody or anything, but inevitably, hearing of wood and fur and cod, then limestone in the hills, then granite in the islands, then postcard views for their vacation homes, others did.

By the 18th century immigrants from Europe were building houses and burying bodies in what amounted to a small town, with church and school and store, and for the next 300 years, and especially after the Industrial Revolution, the slopes of the hill added encroachments - what might be called suburbs if so small a town as Owls Head can have a suburb - from the city of Rockland to the north. The latter half of the 20th century contributed three wide, asphalt roads that climb up the rest of the hill, away from the shore and Route 73 and the lower classes, and gash the woods with houses.

Ingraham’s Hill is now the densest part of town, complete with subdivisions. Most of the open spaces and lanes that remain from the old times have been filled in.

I've taken a September morning to walk south from the Rockland line down Route 73 (quaintly called Ingraham Lane by the post office and Google Maps) for a mile, first to explore all of the short, eastward "Lanes" going down to the ocean, and then, coming back north, to attempt the longer, more modern "Drives" taking the gradual incline to the west.

The north side of the hill, that extension of Rockland, seems to be more seasonal, less neighborly, one street ending in a B&B, for example, and another sporting a line of rental cottages packed so closely together as if to mimic the Jersey shore. The road names are literalist, a throwback to prosaic times: Harborside, Ocean, Cottage. But when I get to the top of the hill, the start of the old Ingraham’s, I can no longer call what I see the suburbs. The suburbs I’ve known have been planned, homogenous. This place is not; these neighborhoods are cut haphazardly by lanes that twist down to the sea and remind me more of small Minnesota towns I've lived in and visited (minus the sea, of course, and hills altogether): a range of houses from ranches and Cape Cods to saltboxes and converted sheds, and even a trailer or two; a variety of lot sizes; most gardens and lawns obsessed over, religiously neat and over-trimmed and gnomed to death, some defiantly not, messy and uncut; few people doing anything outside but getting into cars; and those cars all American vehicles with Maine plates. Down by the shore, there are no mansions and no Massholes, in spite of the million-dollar views of Rockland harbor and the Fox Islands and Owls Head Light. These parts were settled when waterfront property was prized more for commerce than for viewscape.

It also reminds me of the poor towns of Washington County way Down East, far from the pressures of post-war population growth, with their small, weather-beaten houses and modest shore frontage - poor in worldly goods, that is. There's nothing fancy in this part of Owls Head either, not even on the shores of what the realtors call “bold” Penobscot Bay. But in these modest dwellings might live riches of tradition, if not outright belief in a slower way of life.

The names of the lanes here are evocative and personal, memorializing English settlers called Everett, Guptil and Knowlton. One imagines tough fishermen, tenacious farmers, mercenaries, revolutionaries. Head of Bay Cemetery, bordering the road at a high point, as if the grave of a sailor deserves a view of the sea, is full of these former Brits; the grave of one Samuel Bartlett, 1748-1813, is the earliest one I find. These first American settlers of Ingraham’s Hill may have been restless like the rest of us, wandering from their homes for food or work or lust, but they didn’t re-locate for “happiness,” or career enhancement, I wager, and they came back to their family places to die in peace.

Reluctantly, I leave the cemetery, and the hill, and the 18th century, and walk down 73 to the south, whereupon the houses become much newer, only a few decades old. I know this because my sentimental guide on these walks, a kind of talisman to link to the places and people of the town, has been the Owls Head Fire Department map from 1978 that I found in the attic of our house after my wife and I had bought it, on which the cartographer inked in not only the roads but all houses of the time as well, and on which many of today’s houses (and a number of roads) do not appear. The changes in 35 years are what you’d expect, a little more of everything. But down here, on the new side of the hill, the names have become more pretentious, more nostalgic - Clamshell and Head of Bay and even exotic Peaquot (sic) - as if the new generation was trying to connect to a more vivid past. I sympathize with the sentiment. My own sense of nostalgia is strong but stops, I’m afraid, at the Industrial Revolution.

Those of us who grew up in suburbia are well familiar with this exodus of moving from the personal to the anodyne, from headland to flatland, from inner suburbs just younger than their parent cities to distant exurbs. Our civilization progresses and spreads, not on the backs of horses or the decks of lobster smacks, but in the terrible comfort of power windows and superhighways, and we lose touch not only with ancestor and neighbor, but with soil and rockweed, red-winged blackbird and loon besides. On the old part of Ingraham’s Hill, at least I see a few names on mailboxes that I also see in the cemetery, and in spite of the obvious difficulty of life, which is visible in the flaking paint and the old trucks, in the plastic on the windows; in spite of the modesty of abodes, and lack of power boats and fancy docks; or perhaps because of all this, I suspect that rootedness and tradition in a place like this count for much more than urban and suburban America may remember, or ever know again.

Self-sufficiency, however modest, has its price. Hypocrisy and gossip, xenophobia and small-mindedness surely exist in this place just as they did in the flatlands of my youth. But in Maine, as in most of New England, I’ve found that life is more often leavened with tolerance than burdened by spite. Maybe the ghosts of all those ancestors keep folks in check. Your great-great grandfather lying in Head of Bay Cemetery might not look kindly on you if you lost your friends to malice, or your soul to money.

I reach the intersection of North Shore Drive and turn around to walk back north on 73. As I came south, I could hardly ignore those three wide roads going west, obviously leading into classic suburban developments. At least they weren’t named by stringing nature nouns together, “Pheasant Hollow Run,” for example, or something to do with vistas. The developers stuck to the facts more or less, and the three drives, south to north, the 50s to the 70s to the 90s, are called Bayside West and Harbour Hill (but do note the "u") and Freedom. Still, the etymologies here strike me as significant, these “drives” vs the “lanes” across the way, the former implying vehicles and the latter implying hedges, and what does that tell us about the way America has developed?

I think about just continuing on 73, ignoring these places of tract housing and instant landscaping. They will bring out the worst in me, I know, prejudices and resentments and judgments. Until settling down as an adult, I lived in small towns and new developments and inner cities and outer cities, constantly on the move thanks to a father’s callings, and all the while craving permanence. I’m on the edge of finding it in Maine, but these drives are reminders of my uncertainties, and our peculiar unsettled American way of life. It’s a struggle some days to appreciate the work of humans, our pollution of land and air and water, our destruction of species including, someday, our own. Some days I rant and hector. And it's a very warm day, excellent for complaining, and I've already spent two hours meandering along the shore and through more interesting pasts, and damn, it’s hot, it shouldn’t be this hot on a September morning in Maine.

Last year I set a mission, however. Perhaps it’s a silly one, but it requires me to walk the length of every road in Owls Head, and I gird up the loins of the mind, prepared for battle.

As I walk into the first development, I wonder if it helps or hurts to imagine the summit of this hill as it used to be. It was completely forested, of course, for millennia. As the Europeans settled in, it was cleared for farming like the rest of New England, but when the riches of the West lured away the restless and the adventurous and the poor, the forest gradually returned. And now, in the space of 50 years, America having won most of its several wars and prospered, the west side of Ingraham’s Hill has become a stark emblem of the new mix of city and country: three long streets regularly laid out and worthy of any urban outskirts, one little reclaimed farm, one large remaining piece of woods.

Okay, I see that the houses on Bayside West are not exactly tract housing. They're nice houses, in fact, mostly Colonials in great variety and set on two- and three-acre lots, much nicer than anything I lived in as a child. Here we have uniform neatness and care. Each house is set chastely back from the road, with lawns and flower gardens; the drive will end, I predict, in a classic cul-de-sac. Some trees have been retained to border the road. Yards seem to back onto woods.

But the development has not been finished. There are many lots un-built (and a look at the town's property tax maps confirms it). In fact, none of these three developments reached its goals. All of them have vacancies. And yet they kept on coming, these wounds in the country. Three separate developments within a half-mile, three separate generations – Bayside West hosting the post-war promise, Harbour Hill the Great Society dream, Freedom Drive the post-Reagan exuberance, each one building bigger houses on bigger lots. The drive for the American dream seems especially wasteful here.

I’d like to think that the original owners of the land, perhaps farmers, or descendants of sea captains, or just nature lovers, held their properties for a long time, and then fell sick, or got old, and the kids didn't want the land or wanted the money more, and therefore they succumbed easily to developers making pitches. For who can resist a vision of a warm and secure retirement in Florida, especially when beautifully rendered prospectuses of big houses on your land persuade you of the gratefulness of the people who would build them and live there happily ever after?

But apparently a bit of farming still lives on here. I stop walking on Bayside (it seems endless) and a little farther up Route 73 I find Headacre Farm Road. There are a few small houses at its beginning and then I stop and go no farther. I’ve walked into what is obviously a farmyard.

To someone raised in cities, a farm is somewhat intimidating: fences (what dangers are trying to get out?), vicious-looking vehicles, mud in the yard and things worse, bad smells, gruff men in overalls, dogs never tied up. I should be able to deal with it; I spent several weeks in successive childhood summers on a farm, my grandparents’ in Minnesota that boasted all such attributes. But yet I’m nervous. Respectfully, I leave, even though I’m pretty sure that a farmer is much more likely than, say, a suburbanite, to welcome further exploration of his vivid world.

Or in this case, hers: a subsequent Google search tells me Headacre Farm is operated by a woman on behalf of its owner, a chef, for whom she grows fruits and vegetables to serve at his Rockland restaurant. It’s only a few acres, this representative of the locavore movement, but I’m pleased to see any victory in the battle against lawns.

Harbour Hill Drive is much like Bayside, only wealthier. I don’t get to the end of this one either. I leave it mid-way in and hurry away. What I had glanced at as I walked south a couple of hours ago - a two-track dirt road disappearing into woods - has suddenly become a compelling necessity. I need a purge, I need to find a hidden gem. And walking – not driving - finds it for me. I must have missed this track a thousand times, speeding in a car to the stores of Rockland.

The track gradually ascends up Ingraham's between Harbour Hill and Freedom, and I walk for almost a mile without seeing house or lawn or loon-shaped mailbox. The owner of these woods (it's one person, I’ve learned, owning two sections of 80 acres each) has kept his sense, apparently, or maybe hasn't had the right offer, or (these days) any offer at all. The woods are cool and my energy flows back and I suspect the track will come out eventually on the mysterious Weskeag marshes that I’ve not yet seen.

But for the third time I don’t make it to the end of the road. My suburban soul feels the faintest frisson (fresh tire tracks in the mud, for example) of trespassing on someone else's wilderness, or perhaps I need to save the illusion of endlessness for another day. Or maybe lunch is conveniently calling. Nevertheless, here has survived a much better vision of life than the temerity of the Drives: a tangle of trees and shrubs, un-exhausted air, wanton weeds, puddles in the track, birds calling and leaves rustling, the quiet sound of land that is not silence, not noise.

There are even two metaphors made flesh. At the side of the track, ten minutes in, a rusty wreck of a car lies in the scrub, very old by the size of the wheels and the Model-T shape of the body, and then, a few steps on, a bald eagle takes flight in a flurry and a crashing - these two greatest symbols of America, one derelict and destructive, one very much alive and free, at least for a while.

There’s one last trial, Freedom Drive, for which my loins have to be severely girded. The houses here are the newest and biggest and the lots are the largest and almost every lot remains unsold. In fact, only three houses grace this half-mile of road. It's a place almost completely barren of trees, whether naturally or by bulldozer, and not only that, but one of the three houses is missing the usual fringe of ornamental shrubs besides, and it stands there stark and naked like a model house hastily tarted up for a show. I feel judgments rising like crows from a field. The place announces, “Protect us from nature and unpleasantness, separate us from those unlike us.” If that is the motivation, I will not hesitate to snipe and screech. Who builds on the tops of hills anyway but the well-to-do and insecure?

Yet what is here displayed may be the deepest American dream - freedom to be all by yourself, in luxury, dependent on others only at the remove of money – and it is one that I myself have strived for, that I suffer and enjoy every day. From an outside standpoint, I’m just as guilty of excess as any resident of Freedom Drive. Just the basics of living in two places make for embarrassment, however much I worry about my gas mileage and my electric meters and my roomfuls of stuff. And things get more confused. I’m well-steeped in the Calvinist talent for hypocritical criticism of others, and I might wish to employ it at the moment but for the annoying fact that if I ever got to know any of the people living here, to understand their problems and hopes and worries, I wouldn’t be able to judge them at all. A person met singly will almost never fit a stereotype.

And so the dilemmas and the divides grow bigger all the time, between individual and group, city and suburb, heaven and hell. Worldwide, some one billion of us are well off to degrees that range from the comfortable to the obscene. For the planet to survive as we know it, our lives must be changed - in degrees that range from simple education to profound regulation - for what if the other six billion people who don’t live like this suddenly did? Who could blame them?

I should say at this point that I use the suburbs as a kind of straw man. I set them up to be destroyed, all the while knowing that many (well, a certain kind anyway) are pleasant, even beautiful. America invented them for a reason – they satisfy any number of personal and family needs. I have lived in one ever since settling down near Boston, 25 years in the same house no less, and continue to do so in my current, sometimes tenuous split between city and country, and my children knew nothing else but one suburban home, in a safe and loving neighborhood, until they went to college.

I can sit on my Massachusetts patio, under the big trees in the backyard, and dream almost as vividly as I can in Maine. There are deer in my suburb, and coyotes. A female wild turkey pecked away under our bird feeder recently, trailed by six little ones. I hardly have to mention the proliferation of rabbit and chipmunk and mouse and opossum and raccoon and of course the ubiquitous squirrel. A black bear wanders through Brookline; a moose is spotted in Concord. Thoreau would be beside himself – Maine has come to Massachusetts.

Of course, this is a matter of wildlife adapting to us and not vice versa. We’re not adapting at all. We’re mostly taking.

We will need time to fix the mess we’ve made, and probably don’t have it. Places like Freedom Drive, not to mention my own good fortune, ought to be levied a carbon tax all their own. I will judge our collective behavior.

This is dispiriting stuff, and for the fourth time I don’t complete the walk to the end of the line. Everything is all mixed up. Personally, one never seems to get to the end of anything, but collectively the end rushes at us like the apocalypse. Prophets are petted like house cats, profits are revered like gods. I walk back down the hill for the last time, and I can see in the short distance, just over the border into Rockland, the Victorian edifice of Primo, one of the best restaurants in the Northeast, where dinner for two costs a week's wages for someone from Everett Lane, and I see the shining waters of Penobscot Bay, and the faint outline of Vinalhaven, and a glimpse of the open sea – all the things you’d put on the Freedom brochure.

But at the same time, equally visible from this compromised Eden, I can see the warehouses and factories of Rockland Industrial Park, the squat, rusty, corrugated sheds of the Mid-Coast School of Technology, the little saltboxes down the hill. I can hear the traffic on Route 1. In too many places the changes have happened, maybe inevitably, and that’s hard to accept. Our children may still have some certainties of forest and marsh and deep, pure, mysterious ocean to hold onto, but their children?

I retreat to the car.  One last task: drive to ends of each Drive and therefore complete the mission, sort of. The car has broiled in the sun and I open all the windows to let in the sea breeze. I was the only walker on these streets today, and as I drive I review myself walking up and down, hot and tired but at least outside. People perhaps wondered who the crazy was. Nobody walks on such streets. Everything is too far away, stores and friends and your kids’ play dates in the next development and maybe even the mailbox at the end of your driveway. Everybody drives. Visitors, authorized and not, reach the end of your street and it is dead, a circular cul de sac made to get seamlessly into and out of. It’s much easier not to think in a car, comfortable and anonymous and air-conditioned, glassed-in like a sun porch from flies and fresh air.

And now the car takes me away to my own house and deck, my own Eden where, away from the traps of the past and the worries of the future, I’ll eat a sandwich and watch the eiders dive and make notes and read a book and for a while think about things industrial hardly at all.

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[bostonpoetryslam]

These, then, are the several humane methods that must be considered, for if the tables were turned, if some large, alien Homarus americanus arrived in our neighborhood with a taste for Homo sapiens al fresco, then we too would appreciate the consideration. To proceed, stick a thermometer in your principles. The throes we commit on the lobster vary greatly – frozen to insensibility in many minutes, boiled to death in a couple of minutes, hammered to death in a few seconds, electrocuted to death almost instantly – but they’re still death throes. If the moral temperature rises, we may have to give up lobster (red meat, white meat, eggs, etc.) entirely. Understand that this reasoning may be hypocritical. We can hardly live without inflicting inhumanity on something. The world’s moral soul does not bear close examination and we cannot substitute “painlessly” for “humanely,” not even for killing lobsters. There may be no such thing as “painless.” Therefore, one needs illusions to live.

From "How to ______ a ______ lobster _______" by Jim Krosschell, as published in PANK magazine.