Otherworldly Maine (12 page)

So it must have been at that point the Magician went to his closet, grabbed the blue denim laundry bag and shook out a bunch of dirty clothes onto the floor. Then he gathered a few items from a drawer, stashed them into the bag in a big clatter, and the whole crew set off for the Hollow Tree.

The Hollow Tree was a beloved campus landmark, a huge old cottonwood on the long, sloping lawn above the Penobscot River. It was the biggest tree around, and some people even claimed it was the largest in the state of Maine. At the base of its immense trunk was a gaping hole, wide as a church door, that led into an immense, rotted-out interior. Inside was cozy as a chapel, with space vaulting upward into the dim rafters of the world, where statues of angels and Madonnas might lurk unseen in dark niches. There was room enough in there you could celebrate a mass if you wanted, or have a party, or—more intimately—bring a date and make out.

Most everybody who attended the university in those days sooner or later did. It was a rite of passage and widely held that if you didn't make out in the Hollow Tree at least once before graduation, you couldn't really call yourself a University of Maine alum. Over the decades, the aura of all those comings together inside the tree must have inhered into the very xylem and phloem of that venerable monarch; if tree rings were a record of lovers' trysts rather than years, then this cottonwood easily qualified as the oldest living thing on earth.

I like to imagine that when the Magician and his band of dorm rats showed up there in the wee hours of the night, a pair of terrified lovebirds were flushed from cover, bolting out from the Hollow Tree as the truth sometimes does in the course of things. There they go, a couple of quail, bobbing as they weave, hopping and tripping as they tug up on jeans, open shirt and open blouse unfurling behind them in a ghostly flutter. They flee across the dark lawn toward still darker reaches in the distance, until their fantastic forms fade into the same stuff from which everything after midnight is made, two blurs in the blur of darkness.

The Magician and company now stood in front of the Hollow Tree. Preparations were made for the ritual. The Magician emptied out the clattering contents of the blue denim bag: a can of Sterno, a camping pot, a potholder, some matches, and another item, hard to see. The Magician instructed Crilly Fritz to go inside the tree and carve
Croatoan
somewhere in its heart. With gusto Crilly pulled out his pocketknife and vanished into the cottonwood.

By the time he emerged from his task, the Magician had things set up on the grass. The can of Sterno was going. The guys stood in a semi- circle around him. Using the potholder, the Magician suspended the camping pot over the blue flame. He had begun his conjuring. I guess you could call it that.

All of the guys now went drop-jawed, looking back and forth between what the Magician was doing and one another, or maybe they were just looking for the exit sign. The Magician's spell, performed in a tone of voice that seemed to rise directly out of a catacomb, went something like this:

Most people are discomfitted by poetry in one way or another, and these guys were no exception. But they were thoroughly undone when the Magician started to lower into the camp pot a waxen figure—some say it was in the shape of an angel, others say it was a bear, and there is one report that insists it was just a handful of birthday candles—and proceeded with his incantation:

By no academic standard can this be called good verse. You won't find stuff like this in a
Norton Anthology
. But if a poem is measured by the effect it has in the world, then this one reversed the magnetic pole of reality.

First thing the guys hear after the Magician finishes is the growling. It erupts from somewhere deep inside the tree, then pounces out like a panther or a really mad Bigfoot. Everybody, including the Magician, goes lime white and starts trembling like an aspen grove. The Magician himself is the first one to break, taking off like a barn-sour rental horse. The rest of them are right on his tail.

Given what happened over the next few days, it's no wonder these guys fell into tacit agreement never to mention this episode again. The whole thing is embarrassing. Even today if you manage to track one of them down and ask about that night around the Hollow Tree and how it might have been connected to the Witch Hunt that followed, they will deny any knowledge of the topic. It's the main reason the story didn't get out before this.

Here's the next part.

The other famous campus landmark was in front of the gym: a bigger-than-life-size statue of a black bear. The black bear is the University of Maine mascot and this one had been around since the days of Rudy Vallee. I've seen a yellowed photo of old Rudy standing next to this bear. The singer is wearing a long raccoon coat and is crooning something through a megaphone, probably the “Maine Stein Song.” So this picture would have to have been taken in the late Twenties. Otherwise pretty ferocious looking, the bear was made out of wood and plaster, so by the time we got to college in the Seventies he had been chewed up by termites and was looking pretty mangy.

On the very next morning after the high jinks around the Hollow Tree, Peter Snell was heading to the gym when he was shocked to discover the bear was gone! There was the empty pedestal, and all around it he could see footprints and deep ruts leading off in the direction of the woods. Peter Snell had flunked basic math a couple of times, but this two-and-two he could put together. He ran back to the dorm, terror stricken, with the whole pack of junkyard dogs that was his imagination nipping at his heels.

He found the rest of the Magician's assistants from the night before and warned them of the big trouble afoot. Whatever level-headedness had remained among them had now been dropped into a vat of acid. Greg Downing, another dorm resident, happened to be walking past the room where they were in heated deliberation. What he overheard didn't make much sense, so he thought it was just another bunch of Saturday morning drunks. He wasn't able to say who said what, but among the fragments of conversation preserved in his report are these:

“Shit! Do you really think that bear's name was Croatoan?”

“Shit! Is
that
what we heard growling in the tree?”

“Shit, we gotta get that bear back—the football team's gonna kill us!”

And lastly: “That Magician is a dead man!”

Then the guys charged out of the room—no need to repeat their names, you know them by now—and went off, presumably to grab the Magician and force him to set matters aright. One of the things we learned in political science class was that the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy; the same might be said, at least in this case, when it comes to folly.

Now, believing that a ratty old statue of a bear, some dilapidated university mascot, could be conjured—even by mistake—into life, and that its name would just happen to be Croatoan, is by no means as far fetched as you may think. Wacky behavior stemming from wayward belief happens all the time in America. It may be the only story we've got.

Compare, for instance, the man from Plymouth, Massachusetts, who, a couple hundred years ago, had an idea about how to bring in a few more tourist dollars to his pretty how town. He went down to the harbor and walked out onto the strand of dreams. Or maybe it was a mudflat. The place was strewn with unremarkable boulders dropped there about ten thousand years ago—a heap of junk a glacier didn't want anymore. It had been lying there like this for millennia. But he walked around for a while, like people do in Fairly Reliable Bob's Used Car Lot, and at last selected a boulder, perhaps the least remarkable of them all, into which he chiseled four numerals: “1620.” Next thing you know, the rock exploded into myth.

Historians assure us that the picture of Pilgrims stepping off the
Mayflower
onto this rock as if it were a welcome mat to the New World is little more than a charming bit of Thanksgiving lore, but it nevertheless translates into some overly firm belief. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville (that shrewd Frenchman) observed just how obsessed Americans had already become with this coffin-size piece of glacier trash: “I have seen fragments of this rock carefully preserved in several American cities, where they are venerated, and tiny pieces distributed far and wide.” Today Plymouth Rock is housed in a kind of Greek temple, and it draws millions of people a year to an otherwise unexceptional place surrounded by sour cranberry bogs, lonesome pine woods, and smelly salt marshes. Talk about conjuring!

Well, the guys did find the Magician that day, sometime around sunset, and hauled him back to the Hollow Tree, where they planned to make him cancel the faulty spell cast the night before. But when they got there a lot of angry people were swarming about on campus—the football team had just lost—and the Hollow Tree was in plain sight, so our boys beat a hasty detour to the forest behind the university and went down the woods path that the cross-country team trained on.

At some point they left the trail and pushed into the dark spruce and fir forest where they found hundreds of small cheesecloth bags festooned from nearly every branch of the evergreens. The guys thought this a little strange, but they had bigger and stranger worries: they had to get that bear back before somebody got hurt—namely them—at the hands of a superstitious football team and its angry fans.

By the time they reached a spot secluded enough to perform whatever crazy ritual deemed proper by the Magician, dusk had settled in.

“Get going,” Animal said as he gave the Magician a nasty shove. “Get that bear to go back where it belongs.”

“Look,” the Magician said, “I'm not sure I can. I don't know any spells that work on bears.”

“What do you mean? Look what happened last night. Sure as hell looked like it worked to me. Just say the same thing, and make sure you mention the bear's name again.”

“What are you talking about? What name?”

“Croatoan, you idiot!”

“I don't have my magic kit,” the Magician said, “I left it at that tree last night. When I went back this morning to get it, all the stuff was gone.”

“We don't have time for that crap. This is serious. Look, here's some candles. We'll light them and stand around holding them and you just sing that damn bear back to where the hell it belongs. Now do it!”

Alas the Magician, wanting his bag of tricks, did the only thing any performer can do in such a situation—he winged it. Who knows exactly what words he chanted, but they came through in that same catacomb tone, only now they tumbled along through the dusky forest like empty trash cans in a Halloween wind.

Little is understood anymore about the relation between word and world. In sounding it out, you might think there is some vast separation between them, starting with the letter
L
and reaching out to every level of meaning. But this would be an error. There is no separation, or so they say. To the artists who work in this medium—which goes by the name of magic—there is a conviction that nothing happens by chance or luck. These people align their actions with some bigger principle, in some cases bright and shining, and in others very dark indeed. All of them use the human voice to express the inner nature of the mind, to draw forth its secret manifestations and to declare the will of the speaker or a guardian angel or whatever demon might have stowed away for the course of any particular human life.