BLUEBERRIES

What a great time a the year, ehh guys ! ? ! ?

The end of summer is rapidly approaching and Bonds has now broken Aaron’s home run record. Makes me wonder how many more dingers he’s going to hit before he finally retires from the sport of baseball and the rumors and shit hangin over his head with the steroid fiasco. But what’s he going to do?

Damn, I’ll be glad when baseball season and playoffs are finally over cuz it means that we’ll have then started our season of hockey. Wooo - Wooo !!

Of course for all of you knuckleheads we’ll have the start of football season in there too. School starts up for a whole bunch a you guys too I guess. Oh, those were the days, huh? Hookin up with your buds and trashin on each other about what you didn’t do over the summer and a course givin a good look-see at the parade of the opposite sex material. Good shit all around, ehh!

Next weekend, in a little town in Maine, the folks there will be celebrating their Wild Blueberry Festival. I happened to read about it in the American Profile, a weekly publication delivered in my local newspaper. The town is named Machias and they have a blueberry pie-eating contest and other activities that draws about 20,000 people to the small community.

The town that I currently live in has their Tomato Festival this same weekend. Guess I’d rather be in Maine though. Nothin wrong with tomatoes I’m telling ya but I just love blueberries.

Maine’s got lobster’s too and I sure like them a lot, uh huh. And it’s usually got a fairly good hockey team, the Black Bears, that quite often makes the finals for NCAA Division 1 playoffs. Quality hustler and skater extreme, NHL’er Paul Kariya played for them, even though he wasn’t born and raised in Maine. As a matter of fact there have only been four NHL players that have been born in Maine.

For half the school year and most of the following summer of the fifth grade I spent in Maine. A little town down east called Damariscotta, it was. Shared the opposite side of the river, named the same, with another little village that goes by the name of Newcastle. The Damariscotta River at this point is a tidal river. At high tide it looks like a river and at low tide it looks like a creek running through a mud flat. When the tides coming in the river flows inland which surprised the living shit out a me one time.

We were friends with the Reed family. They owned the dry goods store in town and lived right on the river. Dad rented a cabin from them before we joined him and rented the Page house. Anyway it was a hot day and a couple of the Reed kids wanted to go swimming so I decided to join them in diving off their dock. I dove in and I swear the water felt like it was about only thirty-five fuckin degrees which was shock enough to take my breath away, but when I surfaced I was already about forty feet upstream from the dock and awfully stinkin disoriented. I just about didn’t have enough strength to swim back to the dock against the incoming current and I sure as shit wasn’t going to try to go to the rocky shore. Climbing through the shallower water, rocks and those scary horseshoe crabs wasn’t going to get it for me. Shit, I figured I was going to drown, there for a minute.

When we first moved up there it was winter. Supposedly one of the worst that they had in years. So at school at recess we went out in the playground and I learned how to play marbles on top of packed snow. Yeah, marbles you guys, weren’t no Game Boys back then. I don’t remember that there was any hockey in town either. Shit there might not be any yet. The grade school was Castner and our nickname was the Coasters. Would-a been a good name for a slacker hockey team, ehh?

I did play some baseball there though. One of my classmates thought I was a good pitcher so he talked the coach into letting me pitch one afternoon. After the coach relented he told us to go off to the side and warm up. So we did and the first pitch I nailed the coach in the back of the head. So much for getting a chance to pitch.

What else do I remember about Maine?

Damariscotta has the Chapman House that I used to walk beside when I went uptown (yeah they said "uptown" not "downtown") to the drugstore for an ice cream. Its about 250 years old and is of historical value. I always thought it was the home of “Johnny Appleseed“ Chapman, but I checked on it recently and discovered that it was built by and lived in by Nathaniel Chapman, one of his relatives.

We drove somewhere once to see the total eclipse of the sun because it wasn’t "total" right in Damariscotta. We got to an old fort or something and the damn place was pretty much clouded over. Didn’t get to see much of anything. It was the shits! But that’s what ya did back then. If ya were kind of a techie like Dad then ya were into telescopes and outer-space shit. There weren’t any computers to fart around on and TV was only what ya could pick up with an antenna.

Newcastle, across the river, had an author, Mary C. Jane (maryjane???), that wrote kids’ mysteries that I had read much of before we moved to Maine. I hoped that I would run into her sometime and tell her that I liked her stories. Never did. I often times think that Stephen King must have read her stories as a kid too. Besides being scary-good they had some similar subject titles as King’s work; like “The Dark Tower Mystery (1966). I don’t know, but I’d like to meet Mr. King, too, and ask him about that.

Fifth grade at Castner still had cursive writing class and I’ll be damned if the bitch instructor wouldn’t rap your knuckles with a wooden ruler if ya talked or messed up. And we had French classes - that - I thought was pretty cool for fifth grade.

During the winter we could leave our free lunch milk out in the snow to keep cold or we could choose chocolate milk and take it inside and put it on the heating register ending up with hot chocolate for lunch. Mmmmnnn - not bad!

I got my first dog while we lived in Maine. She was a lab/golden mix and we named her George. Though I’ve got a shit load of siblings, George was mine to feed and clean up after. She used to leave little pretzel shaped turds behind the stove that I had to fuckin clean up. Yeah that’s the shits. Later when we had to move out of the Page house at the end of the school year and had moved into a guest house at a tourist farm, she’d break her choke chain to get into the lake when we’d take her along for our summer swims. She just loved water. Yup! Taught Jingles how to jump two feet flat right into fresh cow patties on those jaunts down to the lake, too. Caught hell for that exercise.

That was a great place, that farm. They had a bunk house above the barn that would sleep about sixteen. I always wanted to sleep up there but the folks never let me. I got to help gather hay and did some other odd chores. Got to see the farmer get his hair cut by his wife with hand shears (not scissors) with a damn bowl over his head. No shit - it cracked me up even then. We had raccoons that raided our trash and Dad shot woodchucks that he’d see on his way to work down closer to Pemaquid Point.

I’d look for blueberries out there on that farm, but never found any. I found some wild strawberries, really small suckers, but nope, no blueberries.

Now Nova Scotia’s got some blueberries, guys! Seems as though they got them like that town from the newspaper story.

Again due to Dad’s work we were in the coastal northeast. This had been a few years earlier then the time in Maine. We lived outside of Shelburne on a farm that we rented from the MaHaneys. This farm had been their grandparents or something and they lived on the farm right next to us. It was right on Shelburne Harbor where lobstering was pretty big. Once in while we would hear about someone from town whose boat had been swamped.

This place was pretty remote. We had electricity for lighting and such and had a phone that was on a party line. Don’t know what that is do ya? Just know how to text and shit on your cell phone, ehh? Well a party line means that several farms are on the same phone line and you had to pay attention to the ring sequence to determine the call was for your place. For instance: two short rings and one long ring might be for your place and two shorts and three longs might be for a neighbor. No ring tones here you guys.

Lets’ see, what else?

We didn’t have indoor plumbing until Dad fixed the hand pump at the sink in the kitchen. The hand pump above the well outside worked all the time but like the one inside you had to remember to prime it once in a while or all it did was draw air. So that meant we didn’t have an indoor toilet either but we had a double seat outhouse at the end of the driveway that was full of daddy long legs. No point in spending much time in that shanty. Same for no bathtub or tank type water heater. Took a bath in a big galvanized wash tub and the water got heated on the stove or with a submersible electric unit. Yeah and the stove was this big black cast iron wood burning baby. No electric or gas range gas and no fuckin microwave guys.

There were some woods between the house and the main dirt road that was about a quarter a mile away. I remember one time in the evening after coming back from town that we had to stop to let a freakin porcupine cross the drive way.

A lot of deer on the property too. Pretty wild and remote. I loved every bit of it though. Once in a while I’ll smell the combination of the scent of live cedar with ocean odors and it takes me right back there again!

I don’t remember much about Shelburne, the town, except that the grocery store sold peanut butter in colored plastic pails and that they had a place to get chocolate ice cream cones. Didn’t go to school there cuz we were just there for the summer.

I guess that was good that I didn’t. Later while playing senior hockey I got talking in the bar with Eddie, a guy from the opposing team. In the course of the bull shit he said that he was from Nova Scotia. So I told him that I had spent a summer in Shelburne. He raised one eyebrow and asked me what kind a shit I’d gotten into. I didn’t quite understand, but he explained that Shelburne had one of Nova Scotia’s boys reformatories - Shelburne School for Boys. Yeah, I was a good kid, unless ya talked to my ma - she always threatened to send me away to reform school.

Cuz it was summer, I didn’t see any hockey while we were in Nova Scotia either. But shit for sure they’ve got some, ehh? Almost sixty of the boys from this Maritime Province have made it to the NHL. Most current fan favorite from here is Sydney Crosby who was born in Cole Harbor. I don’t think anybody uses a picture of him as their background on their home page. LOL !!! We all know that Crosby’s walking wood. A couple a other guys from Nova Scotia that you’ll recognize by name are Al MacInnis and Glenn Murray. Big guns themselves, ehh?

One time I was climbing on a rock fence that divided our farm from the vacant one next to us and I discovered this thorny plant with grape like fruit. Sour as shit with a little prickly end on them. I took some back to mom and she said that they were gooseberries and that I should go get some more for a pie. I did, she baked it up and it was a damn good pie - kinda like rhubarb. Bring it on!

The folks coulda bought that vacant farm for about $4,000 back then. I sure wish they would have.

So now your sayin “Jasper, what about the freakin Nova Scotia blueberries, ehh?”

Yeah, right. The side of the house away from the road sloped on down to the ocean. A railroad tracks ran through this area running parallel to the shore line. There wasn’t really a beach, not much sand, mostly rocks. And there were washed up ugly eight to twelve inch diameter yellowish jelly fish drying out in the rocks. Nasty suckers they were. Before we got to stay on the farm we stayed in a cabin tent at a campground on the shore. It had a diving dock and one evening some guy dove face-first into one of these burning sensations. You could hear him screaming for about and hour or so that night. Yikes!

So it was nice slope down to the ocean that a couple of cows pastured in sometimes. This whole area was filled with scrubby little wild blueberry plants. I don’t remember if they flowered or anything - just too stupid for that shit - but we picked a hell of a mess of blueberries. Everyday! Remember those plastic pails I was telling ya about that the peanut butter came in? Well we filled a couple of those up and that was enough for a pie. In that one summer, Mom made almost thirty blueberry pies from the berries that us kids picked. But ya gotta remember that everyone of those pies that we ate, Mom had baked in that wood burning stove. And I’ll be damned if I know a women now that could do that.

I never got sick of blueberry pie. It’s still one of my favorites - probably equal to rhubarb - and every time I have some it makes me think of Nova Scotia - not Maine. Any of you honeys or chefs out there want to bake me up one then just email me and I’ll be there in a New York minute. Make sure ya got some vanilla ice cream to top it off, ehh. Best when its warm, you guys!

Either place - Maine or Nova Scotia - are great! I wouldn’t mind retiring in either one. And they both kick out some great hockey not to mention great blueberries.

Guess I’m getting fat on my memories.

Jasper Wheats here, just blueberried out.

Until next time, skate hard!