About Willipaq

Our mother was called to claim her husband's bodiless head. She picked out a handsome stone of speckled gray Vermont granite for the resting place of what was left of her late husband. "Lost in Willipaq," read the stone. Willipaq was the name of the small Maine town where David, our father, died. There was a mix up and our father's body had been cremated by mistake. They still had the head however, neatly tagged and in a box.

—Klein, the Clone from Lost in Willipaq

"I could be picking blueberries..." The man on the next treadmill over was working hard and glowed an apoplectic pink. He had put in his Levitical twenty minutes but kept on moving. We were in the only gym between Bangor and the Canadian Maritimes. Willipaq, ahh... well, Willipaq lies way Downeast. The times and the places of this book are largely the product of the author's imagination. However, there is a place, set somewhere out of time...

At a reduced pace my neighbor spoke of blasting yellow birch with black powder and a fuse: "The 4-foot lengths came skidded and yarded—we just had to cut and split. That yellow birch was standing green and tight as a weasel." This was in the nineteen-forties—he was in high school then:

"Remember when there was that lumber yard there? On Garfield Street? No, you wouldn't remember. I'm going to be 86 next month and that puts me way out front in the remembering department. So we were making a dollar a cord. Cutting and splitting? Stacking, too. We'd drill a hole and tamp in black powder and a fuse. At a dollar a cord—for the muscle work—we spent most of the money for powder and fuse. It was a good summer. There was a war on so what the hell?"

Willipaq is remote even to a born Mainer. The bumper sticker: "I live in the Other State of Maine," beckons from rusting pickups that litter the ditches of Willipaq—roadside memorabilia of a lost war with time.

The first settlers named the county Willipaq for its indigenes, a leisurely crowd who seemed possessed of no sense of urgency. The native people strolled the beaches at low tide collecting mussels, trapped the occasional fish in their weir corrals, picked berries, made love and squatted to their need beholden to no clock. Although the Indians—the easternmost band of the Algonquian nation—and the English had no common language, example proved too powerful to resist and soon floggings were administered to pilgrims caught wading out of the shallow pool of purpose. Berry picking and lollygagging on the beach drew an application of the knout. The settlers sported the starched underwear and stiff black broadcloth of the followers of John Calvin.

That these children of nature were a lost tribe of Israel was a popular fancy of Calvinist lore. The Willipaqs' aimless pursuit of pleasure inspired backsliding among the settlers—protestant vigor was not proof to mixed bathing and sweaty labors under a strange sun. Shapely ankles were exposed while bending over berries and many a maiden found it pleasant to hold her pose. Fornication brought a hundred strokes with the rope's end; discipline was maintained against deteriorating standards of social comportment. It was the good fight, but futile. Many were the righteous arms grown weary with flogging and surreptitious self-manipulation. Strange diseases thinned the Europeans’ numbers; crops failed. They ate gruel made from acorns and the few sacks of seed remaining, and died.

While those Willipaqs released from the relentless summer toil of hunting and gathering holidayed at the shore, the pale-skinned visitors to whom all Indians looked alike made no preparations for the coming of the snows. They covered themselves all in black and took turns hitting each other as they knelt on the sand. The indigenes looked on, astonished.

The fierce coastal winter came and the Willipaqs moved inland to winter over in cozy tunnels dug out of the hillsides, subsisting on unsuspected supplies of dried meat, fish and vegetables. Over the council fires of the Willipaqs that winter, puzzled shamans strove for an intuition to explain the strange behavior of their summer visitors. When the Willipaqs returned to their seaside encampments, they gave a decent burial to what the wolves and foxes had left of the white settlers.

Willipaq County was yet again unimaginatively so named by the next batch of transoceanic intruders who falsely felt that by so doing they would be free from threat of Indian attack. The emigrants were warned of bloody battles sure to follow a collision of cultures. They were easy prey to the scare tales of the old America hands who waffled on, but never left, the docks of Liverpool.

Roving bands of savages were seen at a distance where acres of wild berries had been ravaged by the goats the first white men brought. Undaunted by the disappearance of the first colony, the newcomers dug right in clearing the land for agriculture—plowing, sowing, nurturing, husbanding, drying and salting. While their livestock roamed at will, toil was the portion of the latest wave of homesteaders.

The Willipaqs quietly moved to a more salubrious neighborhood that year; their berrying grounds had been turned to goat forage. The Willipaqs viewed the European tourist hordes, when they thought about them at all, as a natural phenomenon not unlike the suicidal flotillas of squid that beached themselves in quintennial cycles, causing a horrible stink.