Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (56 page)

Crawling out of sleep, I recognized the voice was that of my bride. We were in the bed, in our new bedroom at Mermaid’s Purse Farm. Thank God I didn’t fall down on those boulders.

“Someone is knocking on the door downstairs.”

“I could hear it. They were pounding hard. Dawn had just begun, so there was just enough light to see when I went to the window. First I looked out to where I had tied Della for the night–she was not there. I looked in every direction. She was gone. Then I looked down and saw a pickup truck with a camper. Something told me this was all connected–Della missing and someone knocking at sunrise.

I scrambled around for pants, boots and a shirt while I sputtered to Patricia what I had just seen. When I grabbed the bedroom door knob, she wailed “Oh no!”

Downstairs, I flung the front door open to find a middle-aged man wearing a black ball cap and dark down vest. “Are you the guy walking across the country with a mule?”

After I answered him, he pulled back the left side of his vest so I could see his badge. “I’m with the Gouldsboro Police, and we’ve got your mule up on Highway 1 about ten miles from here.”

Right then the police radio in the pick-up began to babble. The officer reached in the truck and pulled out the microphone. “I found him at the farm on Lighthouse Point Road.”

When the radio babbled back, I heard “. . . got hit by a semi-truck!”

My knees began to buckle from under me. My spine turned into jelly, and suddenly I had vertigo. Going down, I grabbed the officer’s arm and whined, “She got hit by a semi-truck?”

Driving down Highway 1 in Maine, in the dark hours of morning, always made him edgy. Those hours are when the big animals were most active. In all his years of driving eighteen wheelers, he never hit one, but he had seen plenty. And he’d heard the horror stories of drivers who slammed into deer or moose on a night-time highway. Moose were the worst. Their dark color made them harder to see, and their eyes don’t shine in headlights like deer eyes do.

Plus, they’re enormous. When you’re barreling down the highway at sixty miles an hour if you hit an 1,800 pound animal with antlers, there’s going to be damage. One driver was killed a couple of years ago when he hit one. The impact threw the moose up through the windshield–antlers first. The thought of moose antlers crushing the driver’s skull sent a shiver down his spine.

Up ahead, lights came on at Young’s Market. Suddenly, something big darted out of their driveway onto the highway. He didn’t know what it was,
but it was huge. Simultaneously he laid on the horn and stomped on the brake pedal. The big rig skidded toward the animal whose eyes shined in the head lights. It had stopped on the highway directly in the path of the semi-truck. The driver struggled to control the skid. “Move Dammit! Move!”

“No! He said she
almost
got hit by a semi-truck. She’s okay.” The officer said. “We’ve got her tied to a tree up by the highway. Come on, I’ll take you to her.”

Officer Jim Malloy had just climbed out of bed, when he got the call that they needed him to track us down. Because of the two stories that had been on local TV, and the picture with the story in the
Bangor Daily News
, everyone knew who Della was and what we were doing. Plus, for the past few days, we’d been very conspicuous as we walked along Highway 1. But no one knew where we were. After more than an hour of trying to find us, the police got a call from someone with a scanner. They had seen us pull into the yard at Mermaid’s Purse Farm.

“We need to find a way to get your mule back here.”

“I can walk her back.”

Jim said, “I’m sure you can. But after what you’ve been through, don’t you think a ride in a truck and trailer would be nice?”

In case they didn’t find us that ride, I threw our saddle and bridle in the back of his truck. Then Patricia and I climbed in the cab, and off we went to retrieve Della. While we backtracked the route we had taken the afternoon before, Jim asked us about the trip. Then he said, “I heard you’re writing a book.”

“Yes. I call it
Footloose In America - Dixie to New England
.”

“So the end of the book is when you got here?”

“Right.”

Jim laughed, then said, “So, I guess Della just wrote you a whole new chapter. Eh?”

The knot at Della’s end of the rope had come undone again. When I got the saddle and bridle off the cart, I saw her tracks all around it. I could also see where she’d circled the barns and farm house several times. The Big Sis had been looking for us.

When she saw me get out of the truck, Della began to paw the ground and call to me. When I got to her she immediately started rubbing her forehead on my shoulder. Officer Malloy said, “I’d say she’s glad to see you.”

A community effort got our little vagabond family back together. First there was Lisa at Young’s Market. Around 5 a.m. she saw Della dart out in front of the truck and called the police. She also called Anne, who lived nearby and had horses. In the dark, Anne Osborne brought a bucket of grain with which she caught Della and tied her up. The police found us with the help of the couple with the scanner. Then the police called Suzie who had a horse trailer. She owned Chase’s Restaurant in Winter Harbor and was supposed to cook that Sunday morning. But she got someone to cover for her while she toted us back to the farm. No one would take payment for anything. They were just glad to help.

After we were all back at our new home, I hung a hay bag in a tree and tied Della so she could eat from it. Then I fixed her rope so it could not come untied–ever! Tomorrow I would start building a fence for her.

After a cup of coffee, Patricia and I walked down to the beach in front of the farm. In reality, a sand beach on the Maine coast was a rare thing. It’s mostly rocks and boulders, like the shore around Prospect Harbor. The tide was on its way out, so lots of seaweed laid exposed on the rugged beach.

Patricia walked in front of me as we picked our way across the boulders toward the water’s edge. She was shuffling across a seaweed bed when suddenly she slipped and both of her feet went out from under her. Horror raged through me as I watched my wife’s back slam down on one boulder and her head bounce on another.

Frantically, I slipped across the seaweed toward her yelling, “Patricia! Are you okay?”

When I slid down to her side on my knees, a smile slowly spread across my wife’s face as she raised up on her elbows. “I think so. This stinking seaweed is so thick here it gave me something soft to land on.”

Tears welled in my eyes as I swept my bride into my arms and clutched her to my chest. I crowned her head with kisses, then looked to the sky and said, “Thank you!”

-The End-
October 26, 2003

Mermaid’s Purse Farm
Prospect Harbor, Maine

A
FTERWARD

B
UD
, P
ATRICIA AND
D
ELLA REMAINED
at Mermaid’s Purse Farm until the fall of 2006. When they hit the road again, Della was pulling a new plastic and aluminum wagon that the Kenny’s were able to sleep in. Initially they planned to tour New England for another year before shipping everything to Europe for more wandering. However, circumstances arose that required them to return home to Hot Springs, Arkansas in 2008.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HE HARDEST PART OF WRITING
about this trek was deciding which stories to leave out. This book could easily have been more than a hundred pages longer.

What makes doing the acknowledgments difficult is that so many people helped us. Just a list of their names would fill a chapter. You met a few of those folks in the book. I hope their inclusion will serve as my “Thank You!” To those of you who were not included, please know your kindness along the way was greatly appreciated. I wish I had room to thank all of you individually.

But here are some people I must say a special thank you to: Mike Arnold for the great cover of this book. Peter Gelfan and the staff at The Editorial Department, as well as Susan Setteducato, Dr. John Crawford, Pat Laster, Bill White, and Patricia Kenny for their help with the writing of this book.

The following folks helped in lots of different ways: John Cooksey, The Oeders of Ohio, Jack Hill, Holly Anderson, Dr Jess Clement, Diane Ellaborn, Jim Grant, Val & Kevin Karikomi, Howard Lee Kilby, Lenore Person, Bob & Susan Weiss, Peter Hersey, Maggie Meyer & Whistlewood Farm, Chuck & Laurie Morgan, Clinton Reed & Francis Cross, Roy & Gloria Haller, Gordon & Madeline Hamersley.