The Labor of Hands
Context:
Mercer, Maine is the town my parents moved to when they were 24 years old, in 1981. It's a town in rural Maine with a population of about 700 people.¹ Back in 1981, the population was around 300.
My parents bought land in Mercer, built a small house, and later on had two kids: my sister and I. 45 years later, he and my mom are still married and still live in the same house. My dad wrote the essay below in around 2010. The essay is about his way of thinking about Mercer.
As you can see from the essay, he quite likes Mercer.
The Labor of Hands
I once heard a young man tell a story about going on a whale watch in Mexico. They were out in a bay in a small boat and had not seen any whales yet, although a pod was known to be in the area. He decided to put on a mask and snorkel and dive in and look around while they waited for whales.
As soon as he jumped overboard and got below the surface, he saw that he was about ten feet from a very large whale, which filled his entire field of vision. As he put it, "I opened my eyes and it was all just whale."
In a way that’s how it is with me and Mercer memories. To speak of one in isolation is as impossible as it would have been for that fellow to see anything but whale.
One thing is not just related to another in my memory of Mercer—they are all fused. To think of John Bacon is to think of his wife, Ann Bacon, is to think of John’s father, who I never met, but whose salt pile once spoiled his own well and who I knew was road commissioner and a selectman as I once was. Which brings me to Town Meeting, which inevitably leads to the time the town voted the lights out in Mercer and hence the great ice storm of 1998 and my own daughter’s decision to attend public school for the first time halfway through the seventh grade and what Wendell Davis thought of that.
You can see where this leads.
Giving up then, I’ll relate three things I’ve done in the service of the memory of Mercer.
First, I’ve taken my children to every Town Meeting I possibly could, and we discussed every one of them, article by article, town report in hand, and reargued every expense and recalled every remark as best we could.
Second, when Arthur Johnson was still alive, I took my children to see Viola Johnson’s root cellar. Even in the dim basement light they marveled at the jellies, beans and beets all in their jars that shone so bright with their own condensed garden light.
Finally, I took my daughter Rachel by her very little hand, as she was still a young girl in a play dress and open toed shoes and clambered down the rocks and weeds next to the downstream side of the Mill Pond Dam and asked her to look at those large granite blocks, piled so neatly so many years ago. I told her that the next day a crew would begin the job of entombing this monument laid up with hands when water alone ran what loud machinery existed in Mercer.
I told her it would never be seen again. I told her that someday she might be a very old lady and perhaps the last person who remembers this site as it was, and she should not forget it because it is the labor of hands and the expression of the energy of the good people who preceded us in this town.
She looked at it for a very long time and did not say a thing. After a while, we climbed back, hands and feet, with the big damp stones to our right and the wild green beauty of that little gorge below us and to our left. When we got to the road she looked back again, and we got in our car and left.
I still ask Rachel about that visit to the bottom of the falls every once in a while and she still has such a serious expression when she tells me what it looked like that it makes me ache.
Sources:
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer,_Maine