Gilbertville
Part I: Pennies
Canton has followed my family for decades.
My mother was born and raised in Canton, Ohio, a Midwest town she left soon after high school graduation. It’s dry and flat and I’m grateful she fled, turned her life in a different direction and raised three salt-washed, ocean-bred kids at the edge of the Atlantic.
In the ‘70s, my father followed an old friend to a tiny town an hour west of Augusta, Maine and spent a few seasons working construction and scraping by. He liked it there and was drawn to the Androscoggin River, which bowled through town, alive and splendid, with fish to catch, birds to watch, and countless tiny islands to discover. Without a family, he was free to relocate so he bought a piece of property with a small house, and over time added the surrounding parcels until he had a handsome, 50-acre property extending from the rail road tracks on the forest’s edge to the river bank. Canton, Maine was his to explore.
Thirty years later, when my sister neared high school graduation, it didn’t take her long to find the right college. She fell in love with a small liberal arts University on the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York, applied, was admitted to, and committed to attending without thinking twice. She’s recently returned for her final year as Saint, at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.
We note the coincidence and wonder which Canton we’ll next be drawn too. But I’m not thinking forward quite yet. This summer, after touring Durham for the first time, my father and I returned to the house in Maine. For a short time, it was our home, and even after that it was the site of all of our get-aways and adventures. I hadn’t been there since early high school and driving back up to the house, I was struck by how small it all seemed. What had been the grand, oversized playground of my childhood had shrunk in the intervening eight years and I was left reconsidering our home in Maine.
My early childhood took place just as much in the forests and waves of eastern Long Island, as on the river and potato fields in Canton, ME. A once prosperous, burgeoning mill town on the Androscoggin, Canton, (or Gilbertville on older maps) is now a sad place. One gas station stocks milk and beer, and a small general store keeps other essentials, but patrons are few and dwindling. With no job opportunities, families continue to relocate and the government has lured out stragglers, enticing them away from the river’s flood plain by buying out their homes.
My father prepared me for the differences; he’s visited over the years to check on the house and board it up against local hoodlums who’ve ransacked the place without actually taking much. Not that there is anything to take. On an early trip my dad salvaged a 2’ x 4’ glossy wooden plaque with Elton John’s likeness on the front (a memento of my mother’s teenage infatuation) and few family mementos. But vandals come for fun rather than goods. They left the TV, choosing instead to crack windows, tear furniture, hurl ancient jars of mustard against the wall, and shove stacks of plates off shelves, sending them shattering, to the floor. I suppose the house was an easy target; when the out-of-town owners stopped visiting altogether, there was nothing keeping the locals from doing as they pleased. And so, my father warns me as we drive into town, “Don’t get too excited about seeing the house. They’ve pretty well torn it apart.”
It’s an anticlimactic approach to the battered house awaiting us. The road out of town to our property, once lined with houses, old families my father remembers from decades ago as farmers, dairy men, and old-time locals, is now mostly vacant. The people are gone, and their homes too, along with swing sets, lawn ornaments, pets, and cars. They’ve razed the ground and eerily rewound the area to a pre-inhabited state.
We spent long weekends and most holidays in Canton as children, tumbling through the woods down to the river, canoeing around to small islands, sledding and cross country skiing along the snow mobile trails, and setting traps under the train trestles for polliwogs and trout. It’s a three minute walk from the house, across the fields, to the train tracks which curve around the land and house in a sweet, crescent hug. My father’s local friend, a dairy farmer named Craig, is allowed use of the fields, and he sows and harvests them every year with alternating potato and corn crops. In corn years, we ran through the towering stalks, playing hide and seek and imaging whole cities within the rows. In potato years we dug our hands deep into the dark soil, searching for the firm, starchy spuds until our hands and nails were deeply black.
The real excitement, though, was the train. As it approaches, the train whistles in anticipation of the eastern road crossing, circles the property, and chugs toward the western road crossing. We were alive and on fire at the sound of that long Toooooot-tooooooot from the conductor. We screamed “TRAIN!,” and raced, slamming our way outside and on top of the chicken coop to watch it amble by. It’s a freight line that passes our house, without passengers, and it was our earliest and most entertaining counting game to see how many cars one engine could pull. The number at times reached the forties.
When it had snaked its way around the fields, finished its small half-moon curve and was headed north once more, we’d spring into the fields towards the tracks. As I remember, it was an exhausting sprint, over soft, pliant earth, lunging to reach the rails first. But at the other end was treasure: sparkling, flattened coins which we’d set down earlier and could now retrieve in their newly one-dimensional state. They are our tokens, our secret artifacts, our “Roxaboxen” pebbles. No one at home knew you could lay coins on the tracks and be rewarded with twisted treasures, and anyway, there weren’any opportunities. You need accessible tracks and a slow moving train to obtain the elongated eagles and fun-house presidential profiles.
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| Simple map of house in Maine, road, RR tracks and fields. |
Only today, as my dad and I are walking down the road, (it’s oddly much, much shorter than I remember) admiring our newest treasures, does it occur to me that this is probably illegal. Not only the whole jumping in front of trains business, but the more serious destruction of currency. How many felonies have we committed over the years, I wonder, turning money into treasure?
Five minutes ago we were lost in reminiscence when the whistle sounded and we turned to each other in electric muscle memory, our eyes wide. TRAIN! We took off running, me shuffling in flip flops, he with his hand deep in his pocket trying to fish out coins. We weren’t getting anywhere fast and it was coming, whistling and chugging, rolling across the eastern crossing and circling our house. Adrenaline spiked and I felt the only important thing in the world was to reach those tracks before the train. We couldn’t come home from Maine without new squished pennies.
“We’re not going to make it!” he said.
“Stop! Give me the coins, I’ll sprint, I’m faster.”
He handed them to me, I kicked off my flip flops and ran like I have never run before, my bare feet slapping the pavement, my arms pumping, gasping for breath (five months on horseback does nothing for lung capacity) until I reached the tracks, and, like a crazed hero trying to do something actually important and life-saving, laid the pennies, dimes, nickels, and one quarter, on the rail.
I stood up, stepped back, and as I heaved, recovering my breath, the train slid on by, slowly and peacefully, in a relaxed calm that seemed to mock my sprint to the tracks. The conductor in the engine looked down with an amused grin, entertained by the afternoon sight of two adults frantically running to obtain a souvenir, trying to catch a train moving at glacial speed. It didn’t matter. I’d made it. And as the train rolled by, our coins grew flatter and flatter and eventually flipped off onto the timber sleepers between the rails.
And my father and I stood at the side of the road and counted cars.
