Otherworldly Maine (13 page)

Maybe, as you say, all of this is just a load of hooey. You wouldn't be wrong. But if it had been
you
jogging down the woods path that evening on your way back to the fieldhouse after a strenuous and solitary training run because you showed up late for cross-country practice, and you heard that creepy chanting coming from the dark woods and had seen the candlelight flickering among the somber spruce and fir boughs, then maybe
you
would have been struck as poor Leo LaHapp was struck that evening: with the firm impression that there was a coven of witches out there in the University Forest and they were conducting some dark ritual, probably a black mass.

“Holy shit!” you would say, picking up the pace and running the fastest mile you'd ever run in your whole life (and nobody there to see), just so you can get back to campus in time and sound the alarm: “There's witches out there—I mean it—and they're doing animal sacrifices and who knows what all! We gotta stop it!”

Yes, had all this actually happened to you, then a few pages in the underground history of the University of Maine would have been devoted to your exploits. That is, if anybody bothered to write it.

But this is Leo's story and here's what happened to him.

He emerged from the forest and Paul-Revered it around campus, hustling from dorm to dorm and shouting about witches. At first people just dismissed Leo as a rowdy or a drunk, but then he managed to convince a couple of resident assistants at the dorm to go into the woods with him to investigate.

Flashlights in hand, they retraced Leo's path. Along the way, they saw the cheesecloth bags hanging in the trees. Nobody knew what they meant, but everybody agreed they looked pretty sinister, like little ghosts that had snagged themselves in the branches. Then they found some smoking candles lying in the forest duff. But what clinched it was when they heard, from deep in the recesses of the night woods, a horrible racket of breaking branches and snorting animals and demonic cursing, as if a bunch of people were running away. It sounded like a coven of witches!

There's no telling where in the human mind the switch is that, if thrown, turns on mob mentality, but Leo, groping around in there for anything to throw some light on his experience, managed on that memorable Friday night to trip it.

The whole campus lit up in a frenzy. It was like a kindergarten game of telephone gone haywire, or an adult game that politicians used to play called the domino effect. Whatever it was, it was nuts and it was fast. As Westphal describes it: “Next thing you know there's two hundred guys with baseball bats and hockey sticks pouring out of the dorms and heading for the woods. God help anybody they found out there. I think they killed a couple of black cats, I'm not sure, but a lot of those guys were already drunk and pissed off that the football team had lost, so when they couldn't find any witches, they started beating each other up. That witch-hunt was the scariest thing I've ever seen, and it went on all weekend.”

It was as though the campus had sent up a weather balloon into Cloud Cuckoo-land. It stayed up there for a day and a half. In the meantime, the Witch Hunt was big news and almost everybody was taking it seriously.

Since Leo was the first one to spot the trouble, he became a hero of sorts, as well as the de facto spokesman for what was going on. He was now the Cotton Mather of UMaine, demanding the purge of baneful influences. He thought people would be interested in what he had to say, so he set up a makeshift press room in the dorm lounge.

At first it was just a single reporter from the campus newspaper, but as the scope of the events widened, press from off campus started showing up. In eastern Maine, any fuss is big news. Soon there were rumors that TV cameras were on their way and maybe Huntley and Brinkley, too. Lucky for Leo, those who knew the real story, including the fine points of his special dream, had their own problems and were lying low.

With Leo at the helm, all kinds of fools started making report. Stories came in about strange mounds of earth discovered out in the forest. “It must be where the witches buried their victims,” exclaimed one sociology major on Sunday morning. For the rest of the day you saw guys heading off into the woods with shovels. Then came the psychology major who said he saw a bunch of naked people, obviously witches, darting among the trees. “And if you don't believe it, here's a shirt I found out there!” This sent even more people out into the woods; nobody wanted to miss out on a chance to lay hands on these witches. Finally, there were several UFO sightings that weekend, and one thoroughly besotted philosophy major claimed to have been abducted by the aliens, vicious beings who—he insisted—had robbed him of everything. “I can't even remember my name,” he sobbed over and over to the reporters, as Leo stood there with a comforting arm around the poor scholar's shoulders. “We must recover this good man's name,” Leo intoned for the record.

Monday morning was when that weather balloon came crashing down. It dropped in the form of a graduate student in forest entomology who came bursting into Leo's “press room” with a bug up his ass. He said he had been away for the weekend and just gotten back. He had this big experiment going for his dissertation research on spruce budworm. It involved setting up cheesecloth traps out in the forest to catch the insects. When he went out to the site this morning, he found all the traps had been ripped from the trees. Three years of research down the drain. Or up in smoke as the case may be, because he learned that students from one of the Christian organizations had pulled them down and burned them in a ritual bonfire out in the forestry school's stump dump.

“They thought my traps had something to do with witchcraft!” the bewildered grad student declared, as reporters busily scribbled down notes. He also said something about finding a badly charred bear's head nearby. “What the hell's going on around here?” he demanded.

“Oh shit,” said Leo, as he bolted out of there before the grad student could grab him or any TV cameras showed up.

The next day the campus newspaper headline read: “Witch Hunt Proves a Witch Hunt. Campus Bugged by False Report.” Many humiliating details found their way into that story, but somehow Leo was spared public exposure of his special dream. At least he still had that. Also, there was no mention of the Magician, Crilly Fritz, Peter Snell, Animal, or any of those other mischief-makers from the dorm.

Even today very few know about Virginia Dare's role in all this. For Leo's sake, I'm glad. I hope he forgives me for invoking her one more time, but I think these things can now be laid to rest. Everybody should know that the Witch Hunt wasn't really Leo's fault; he was just caught up in a swirl of circumstances. Once that story broke, his reputation on campus was ruined. Nobody called him a hero after that. They didn't even call him Leo anymore. Instead, he was simply “the Bugman.” And the Bugman he remains.

There's a mawkish pleasure one takes in calling to mind events such as these. Sometimes I think my college years were misspent in pulling pranks and cutting classes so I could sit around and write stories like this to entertain my friends. Then I comfort myself by thinking that nothing that happened back there, no matter how silly, was far removed from anything else going on in the world. It was the Seventies and everybody was doing this kind of thing. Call it the “spirit of the times.” Every age has one.

“What a waste!” people say when I tell them the kinds of things we did in those days. “How did you ever make anything of yourselves?” Well, maybe it's like the millions of seeds a cottonwood tree flings out into the world each spring, those tiny, feathery parcels of hope that float together in the air for a while, just drifting around in companionable oblivion. Only one or two of them might ever come down to earth and find a nurturing spot to take root, someplace where they might indeed “make something of themselves.”

After all, while we were sitting around a University of Maine dorm on that Friday evening a quarter century ago, concocting schemes to animate a statue and put a love spell on it, at the same time, on the other side of the continent, there were others with names like Jobs and Wozniak sitting around conjuring up a computer that would be named for a fruit that comes from a tree in Eden; a computer small enough and friendly enough that everybody in the world might own one, a magical box to be connected to millions of other boxes all over the world, so that in the end, no matter whatever else might be said of any individual, each would be a node in some infinite web, each an electric sparkle in the eye of Indra.

And thus my wayward college days are redeemed—because they were never lost in the first place, never removed from the center of things in this center-less universe. In fact, so far as this story goes, they
are
the center. It's mind boggling to consider: whatever it is that causes one idea or name to gain purchase in the wider world while another fades away just may be what ultimately distinguishes a college prank from true magic. Or, as some are inclined to see it, history from myth.

In any case, you may be wondering how it came about that I should now have all these details. Perhaps you're curious as to what happened to the people who appeared in this sketch, or maybe you'd just like to check out these places for yourself, much as literary tourists do when they rummage around the Catskill Mountains looking for Rip Van Winkle's bed, or when they scour Wall Street trying to find the building Bartleby worked in. There's no going back to such places, except by the way we just came. But if you insist on historical accuracy, I'll do my best, though this particular bag of tricks is nearly empty.

First of all, the Magician. He did graduate from UMaine and went on to Harvard Law School. After that he got a job with some Big Eight accounting firm and got busted in the Eighties for insider trading. Last I heard he's selling furniture in Farmington, Maine. The rest of those guys from the dorm I haven't seen or heard about in years, but with names like Crilly and Animal, you can be sure they are well known in their respective neighborhoods, wherever they may be. As for the Bugman, he dropped out of college after one semester, to chase his special dream elsewhere, maybe in Croatoan.

Speaking of Croatoan, for several years after these events, lovers and other visitors to the heart of the Hollow Tree were baffled by this odd word they found carved there. It became part of the campus folklore. There was even a story about a young couple who, not long after graduation, had a baby they named Croatoan, no doubt because she was conceived in the Hollow Tree.

Ah, the Hollow Tree. Sad to say, but even mythical giants must fall. Sometime after I left Maine, the Hollow Tree came down. I can only hope that it wasn't rudely toppled as if it were just another piece of timber, sliced up into logs, and hauled off for target practice in the stump dump, where junior lumberjacks fling axes at old carved hearts and one mysterious word—or worse, carted away to the Old Town mill and pulped into the paper you're reading this on. I would hate to think that this book is all that remains of a million “I love yous” and one special dream. Whatever, the Hollow Tree is gone from UMaine. I wonder if anybody there even remembers it anymore.

As for that old black bear mascot that disappeared—his name wasn't Croatoan. As far as I can determine, he never had a name. Nor did he ever stand up from his pedestal and stalk the campus. Turns out that on the Friday evening before the disappointing football game, the Alumni Association had held a little ceremony. The old bear was being retired. The president of the university said some gold-watch words, then a crane hoisted the crumbling bear onto a flatbed truck that carried it away and unceremoniously dropped it off in the stump dump, for lack of a better paddock. Given the mayhem of the next few days, it's not surprising that nobody ever asked about its mysterious disappearance from the stump dump. But there's an aging entomology grad student—still trying to repair the damage to his career after the disastrous spruce budworm experiments—who could tell you a thing or two about that bear's fate.

So if you had your heart set on seeing a bear at the University of Maine, don't fret—they replaced it. The new mascot is a bit smaller—“leaner and meaner” as the Alumni Association likes to say—and it's made of cast bronze. Some say bronze was chosen so as to prevent the rotted-out destiny that overtook its predecessor. But there are a few—and you know their names—who believe that using heavy metal was the only way to ensure that if
this
mascot should ever come to life, its own weight would keep it from going anywhere. Thus this bear is now fixed in place more firmly than most treasured beliefs.

At long last, there is the mystery of the growl. As I said, I was only able to pick up the threads of this story thanks to Westphal. I paid him a visit over Christmas down on Mount Desert Island and we got to talking about our college days. The Witch Hunt came up, as it sometimes does when we get together. This time he provided all of the details of the events at the Hollow Tree and I wondered how he came upon this expanded version. I knew he hadn't gone along with the Magician and company that fateful night. I pressed him.

“So what gives?”

“Come on down in the cellar with me.” He grinned impishly, an expression I know all too well.

Westphal lives in an old house. Cellars in these places are spooky. They're dimly lit and smell like the earth's dirty laundry. As he led me over to some dark shelves on a back wall, he said, “Hey, O'Grady—that growl? It was me. I beat those guys to the Hollow Tree and was hiding inside, up in one of those dark places you can't see from below. I scared the shit out of them—you should have seen it.”

“No way!” I said.

“Well then, how do you explain this?” He reached up to the highest shelf and brought down an old blue denim bag, clattering with stuff inside. He handed it over to me. We were a couple of bank robbers and here was my share of the loot.