Antediluvian (Debits and Credits)

It's hunting season again and Jimmie grabs his rifle that he purchased at the most American of stores, WalMart...the store that watches out for your children's virtue by blanking out words like, "whore" and "balling" from the newest Rap releases that they carry.

Jimmie and WalMart hop into Jimmie's '89 Chevy pick-up and head for the nearby woods. Rural areas in southern Maine have dwindled in the last few years, a victim of Urban sprawl and big city myth. "Your kids will be happy in the country, the pace is slower there, the life-style is low-key," and so New York and Boston Yuppies, fed up with the "9 to 5, make-a-dollar routine," re-locate to the country, where they bring with them the paranoia, schizophrenia, arrogance and sense of entitlement seeming inherent in their genes. Thus the woods that Jimmie is looking for is grows scarcer every year.

Maine law requires that you not shoot a firearm within 400 feet of a residence...a task becoming more and more impossible in today's southern/Central Maine. That does not stop the Good ole' boys, however. They grew up hunters and will die hunters and no one will take away that right. Certainly not the Yuppies who hide in their homes during November, penning a succession of complaints to local newspaper, congressmen, and PETA, who sometimes stand on Portland's Congress Street dressed as deer and moose, enigmatically decrying hunting's inhumanity.

Jimmie parks on the side of a dirt road. He knows there is a home just ahead, but he reasons, it's far enough away. He tosses his WalMart special over his shoulder and heads for the woods. Up ahead he hears a rustling and aims his rifle, he sees a flash of fluorescent orange, just before he pulls the trigger...it's a fellow hunter, trudging along, frightening his deer! One of "them" from away, as locals call out-of-state hunters. "Too bad he's wearing orange." he thinks, tugging at his camouflage knit cap.

He stops for a moment and smells the cool November morning air. It's great to be alive he thinks, and sees no irony between that statement and his reason for being in the woods. His grandfather hunted--his father hunted, and so do all the guys at his job...it's what makes him a man, one of the reasons his wife Melba snuggles so close to him on nights when he's hunted; and as he thinks back, the best sex he ever had was on the night after he'd shot a 14 point Buck and dragged it home by himself. She'd given herself freely that night, without the usual reservations---without the usual marital restraints.

He sets on a stump and thinks. He knows Maine is changing though he can't put his finger on it. He falls into the usual red-neck refrains, attacks on "Welfare, big business, immigrants and social security." He fails to see the real culprits, nor the shift from textiles to technology and from factories to fast food. Jimmie hasn't noticed that even though he's 47, he's one of the youngest carpenter's working for his construction company. If he could explain it, he'd just call young people lazy, preferring to live off unemployment. This myopia is not limited to just him, it's a sign of a great divide, as the Yuppies continue to pour into the state, changing what it represents for those born here.

Jimmie trudges along, keeping clear of houses..."Out of sight, out of mind" he believes---though he never accounts for the blast that the rifle will make. Today he will not get a deer, maybe tomorrow. But Melba will have a good supper of Baked Beans and Biscuits on the table for him and sure enough, she'll cuddle up close to him, wearing sexy lingerie instead of her more practical flannel, when the lights go out. It's, in part, what makes a man here in Maine, what defines sexual roles in the small towns that still appear untouched by time. But on the outskirts a new Maine grows, shinier and more sophisticated, but less concerned with history, tradition and with their fellow man.

Once relegated to Maine's Liberal Colleges, where it dared not escape, The change-over is now in Portland, in Biddeford, in Brunswick, and it's heading North, to the towns and valleys and forgotten farms...men whose wives are equals, and women who don't need men to define them. A world of computer technology and day trading. It's a Maine no longer subsisting on its connection to Boston by I-95, but by the Information superhighway...and where big city culture is only a key click away. Maine will be a different place for Jimmie and Melba's kids, and who they'll grow up to be is anyone's guess.

It's a new Maine and melding the old with the new may not be an option. It's a future that may render Maine Humorists obsolete for the first time in our history. Who will be left to remember and cherish the past, in a modern day populated by those whose ancestors never participated (and thus take no interest) in Maine's history.