Notes from Maine - 2021/10/24

In the late 90s, my father bought a little cabin down the road from my grandparents’ house. It was a single room, decorated with fishing poles and expired calendars, with a closed-in porch off the back. The reason for the camp was its frontage on the stream. The stream leads up to the big part of the lake, and that’s what my father was really after.

He loves to pilot a small aluminum boat on that lake. 

“You don’t want a boat that’s too big,” he says. “Makes the lake too small.”

Last year, the TV show “Maine Cabin Masters” came and renovated the camp. It’s not charity—you pay for the work, although I suspect you do get a bit more labor than you’re actually paying for. They doubled the size of Dad’s little camp. Now it has a bedroom, bathroom, and functional kitchen. There’s no insulation, so the wood stove wouldn’t really do much in winter, but it’s a fun place to go spend the night for most of the year.

Dad doesn’t get much use out of it. He’s pretty mobile, all things considered, but he should have had the renovations done twenty years ago. His main house is across the road, maybe a five-minute walk, so he probably figured it wasn’t worth it.

My sister and nephew stayed there this summer. We’ve had a few guests borrow it. I took a bunch of friends up for a “camping” weekend.

And… that was it. We got one good summer out of the place.

Then, last Monday, my brother called me up and said, “Someone broke into Dad’s camp.”

Note: I just realized that I have to give some anonymity to this brother for reasons I can’t get into. I’ll refer to him as “my brother” or “*****” for this story.

That kind of thing shatters your illusion of isolation and privacy. 

On Sunday, my sister-in-law told my brother that she saw a strange vehicle parked by the camp’s long driveway. He went over to investigate and ran the people off.

I know that my brother has the ability to be polite and friendly. I lived in that area for ten years and I was as friendly as I know how to be. Still, when I talk to anyone now or go to a store, people say, “Oh, you must be *****’s brother.” This began to happen to me when he had only lived up there for a few months. Nobody seemed to have any idea that I had inhabited that space for years and year until they realized that I had a passing resemblance to *****.

But, he also has a very much “not polite” gear, and he isn’t afraid to shift into it. I didn’t say, “impolite” because that implies that the person just might not possess good manners. What my brother demonstrates, on occasion, is the possession of very bad manners.

I’m certain that the people in the vehicle at the end of the camp’s driveway met the “not polite” version of my brother.

Anyway, he made note of the details of the vehicle and chased the people off. The next morning, he saw muddy tire tracks leaving the camp’s driveway. Investigating, he found that the door had been kicked in and a bunch of stuff had been stolen. They took a bunch of the furniture that the Maine Cabin Masters had created/restored for Dad. They took decorations, bedding, blankets, and they took the wood stove.

My brother scoured the scene, doing his own investigation while he waited for the sheriff. He found some discarded items that had been tossed or fallen from the vehicle. There were plenty of indications that the vehicle left in a hurry, so maybe the items had been left accidentally? Some of the items could be used to identify a person that my brother realized he knew—in fact she works on a crew that renovates camps.

The sheriff arrived and made notes. I can’t imagine a lot of these camp break-ins get solved. Not to disparage the local law enforcement office up there, but this is the same town where a man lived in the woods, undetected, for twenty-seven years. They call him the North Pond Hermit, and he stole from camps for three decades before he was caught. It’s a fascinating story: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Thomas_Knight

So, if it took them that long to catch the North Pond Hermit, what were the chances of them tracking down the stuff from Dad’s camp? Actually, I think the game warden caught the Hermit—maybe the sheriff department never cracked that case?

Anyway, didn’t matter because my brother was on the hunt. 

I can’t really share the finer details (anonymity), but my brother tracked down a suspect, witnessed some of the items in that person’s yard, and then called the sheriff. In less than 48 hours, all the items had been returned. I went up later that week and help put everything back in order, including fixing the door.

Reading back, I might have cast suspicion above on the woman who works on renovating camps. She was actually a victim of another crime, and that’s why her items were left on my father’s property. There was no connection other than that, except it was a lead that my brother chased for a bit.

Unfortunately, it’s not rare to have a camp invaded up in that area. Until recently, it was pretty remote, and thieves understood that they could take what they wanted. In fact, fifteen years ago, my father had his little aluminum boat stolen. Fortunately, he spotted the absence quickly and grabbed his neighbor. Dad and the neighbor drove up to a place where a small bridge crosses the stream and watched Dad’s boat go by, getting a good description of the thief to pass to the game warden. That person was arrested while trying to pull the boat from the water.

I guess my father has amazing luck?

He didn’t lose the boat, and didn’t lose anything from the camp in the end. The repairs to the door were minor. There are cameras up now, so spread the word! 

Last year, when Dad was recovering from his long hospital stay and the camp was being remodeled, I wrote a book I called Elder. It’s fiction, of course. The settings roughly approximates my father’s house and camp, and I did pull certain elements of his personality into it. But then I took the story in what I thought was a more captivating direction.