1 Limington Hillbilly
-- I do love Limington. When we say Limtucky it is a term of endearment. I love the Indian paths along the river, the family cemeteries you stumble upon overgrown in the forest; childhood discoveries, like an 1864 octagon house high above the river seemingly untouched by time made growing up in Limington something like a redneck Bethesda video game: every bluff provided new adventure -- the sandpit could be a place to drink Michelob and race four wheelers, could be, (perfectly fun thing to do); but it also was a deer reserve, and if you and your dog walked in quietly you could get within feet of twenty or thirty deer, and it was just the white noise of hovering insects around you. You, the rottweiler, the deer, and the buzzing -- a wild land behind the dunes. This is magic; not so much when you are thirty-two, maybe. Still, I would put my love for this place up against anyone. I am not deriding anything about Maine, or York County, the people, places, and things. That is, everything, but the Hill People.
-- But let me clarify: I don't mean hillbillies. A Hillbilly is someone who calls women Mam, labors in the heat we've had recently through a Tuesday morning hang-over, and doesn't buckle under it. A hillbilly is a happy person; maybe the world has been a small place for them, but they neither complain about the small world they're in, nor deride the bigger world out there; it's not a judgement, they're just good where they are, thankful for it even. A Hillbilly is a kind person. Shirefolk. Aware of their surroundings. In touch with it. These are the folk, when I meet them, I admire the knowledge they have; they look you in the eye, not as a challenge, or by some sort of phony "How To Influence People" trick heard in a middle-management seminar at the Portland Hyatt Regency, but so that they can see you. Really see you. They won't judge too harshly on anything else you've made yourself up with. They've never sought the promised tricks to enlightenment many of us have, be it religion, (and by religion I mean all the tropes, right down to power crystals, and pseudo-Buddhist, "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual" enchantments, and I'm not hating on you if these are your ways, I've searched for peace and purpose in the most unoriginal lame places: girls, booze, literature, movies -- I am one of those guys; i.e.: a shithead.). What I am saying is: A Hillbilly has "it". They're touched by an angel to be fully integrated, brain to limbs, in the lane of the world they inhabit. The ratios are aligned: when they walk their children to Sunday School still a bit drunk; when they sit down to a good meal with wives, past and present, together; everything in its right place. I know these guys, working guys, raising their children in a half-built house, (they built themselves), that year by year they build just one more little nook to, so that as their children grow, so to the home these children grow up in. These are Folk! And take the booze, these men and women drink not to unleash the imbalance in their lives, but because their wrists and ankles hurt from splitting wood, from raking concrete, from carrying children: the most productive alcoholic in the world, the Maine Hillbilly. So again, I love the Hillbilly. I love the town.
-- Here's a thing about me. The French are fantastic people in a couple ways, the rest of it they're shit, but give them cooking, and give them phrasing. Take this: L'esprit de l'escalier. In English it would take me ten thousand gnarly, circling-back around words, to properly explain this little gem. Basically translated: "Staircase Wit". This is the moment when someone talks shit, and you get sullen, and desperately try to come up with a comeback, and two hours later you think of a real zinger, but by then the jerk has left the fairgrounds, and you're sitting there, whispering this comeback into a bottle. It takes you the whole staircase climbed to get your retort formed. Many highly intelligent people I know suffer from this. Maybe they are too smart, or rather, smart in other ways -- the difference between a Seven Card Stud player, and a Hold'Em player, might be the metaphor here. This is not something I suffer from. The opposite: I can get overridden by too many smartass lines. It is a quick wit disease; the instantaneous formed good line is like a shot of something that can get you feeling drunk, when you fire them out, and people respond to it. It's not a particularly amazing show of intelligence, but it is intuitive, natural: it can't be taught, or trained -- the ratio of the brain went a certain way, and you have a gunslinger twitch for forming the phrase. It gets me more credit for being smart than I deserve, but I realize sometimes a person who I consider super intelligent, when that person feels safe enough to open up to me, the kind of person who I marvel when the real smarts come out in conversation, someone who I would not want to wager I'm smarter than, these people read this particular kind of wit as high-end brain processing power; they hold back. This kind of word-work reads as having your interior ratios aligned -- that balance we all want. There are people I see try to get there, as if being quick with the quip is something to want; but for literary brainiacs, I think they all kind of want to be Oscar Wilde instead of James Joyce. They'd rather be Robert Greene, than Shakespeare. I'd rather be Shakespeare, (a silly thing now, as Greene is forgotten, but not in context!): they want to be the star at the dinner party. But you got to roll with what you brung: Prince can't sing like Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan will never look like Elvis. I'll never be Cormac McCarthy. And you might suffer L'esprit de l'escalier, particularly if you are thoughtful, be at peace with that. Don't get unaligned. A Hillbilly carries himself with the confidence of knowing exactly who he is in the scene he finds himself playing. He won't climb a staircase. He knows what he is and isn't. I long for that kind of genius.
2 The Universal Hick
-- Then there is the Hick. A Hick is venal but harmless. Yokel smirk, blinking eyes, dirty hair: the hick is a universal archetype. We know Jesus made do with a couple; we know Jack Falstaff dealt with many; Hamlet ran circles around them; these are the people who get far more credit for holding back the culture, by the supposed elite, then is fair. These are hillbilly completely unaligned with nature. They hate the city, but require all the developments of the city to survive in the country. They're not bad people. This is what half the people are half the time. Me and you, too. In other words: don't hate the cityfolk, while tapping that iPhone. Don't get mad at big trucks driving up your mountains to install antennae to ugly towers, again, while tapping that iPhone. This role is easily reversed: there is no hick more useless than the City Hick. These are the people you've met who brag about their street smarts, because they grew up, and this is often a stretch, in a "city". These people feel very superior about a bohemian lifestyle they've cobbled together in Portland. Portland? Have you heard of the internet? Portland? Portland doesn't even have a decent hot dog stand! Culture and art have been completely democratized, (or socialized, if you'd rather, I could go either way): you are not unique for any reason other than you could neither hack it in either country or true city: you followed an ideal so out of style and context by this time, it is itself an anachronism. The Old Port can't be the Village when the Village can't even be the Village anymore. There's the great line in Mad Men season one, when Draper is partying with the hippies, and they're downing him for being such a sellout. Then the cops show up in the building, and he puts his hat on, straightens his tie, and makes to leave; one hipster says, "You can't go out there.", and Draper says, "No. You can't." There's alignment with the world around. He'll do all the naughty things you do, and walk out in front of the cops after. A Hillbilly can pull this off. Hicks always get caught. Hicks are silly. A little dull. But for the most part good-natured; they're just too easily swayed. Anyone who could be described as staunch, be they Republican, Democrat: these are hicks. Love'em though.
3 Hill People
-- This happened. A few weeks ago I pulled out of my yard early in the morning to make an eight hour drive back to New York State, again back to work. It was Sunday, and I was in a rented car with NY plates. I stopped the vehicle at an intersection, and stayed there, parked in the road until I had my Garmin plugged in and charging. Nineteen things were going through my mind; it was time to return my mind to organizing the next ten days of work, (organization is not my strongest trait, but I try), and it is a lovely early morning, and of course, this is Limington, no other cars on the road. All of a sudden I hear a voice coming from outside the car. A rather snotty voice telling me that this is why they outlawed using cell phones while driving and I'm being unsafe, and without actually saying it this voice was calling me a real dickhead for parking there in the middle of the road, fiddling with my electronics. I look over and I recognize the person calling out to me -- I recognize him, and I wonder if right then he recognized me -- the car and NY plates may have thrown him off, but I know the kid. While we were never friends, or hung out, I know him, and have since I was a boy. Now this guy is sitting on the stoop of Jongerdens Country Store with his old beat-up ten speed bike. Here is a thirty-something year old man who has lived in the wide open country his entire life, and has never got a driver's license, never driven a car, never had a job, who spends his days riding up and down routes 11 and 25 on his bike like he has since back when I did it too, 9 years old -- and this kid is policing my driving -- this is his town after all. I'm not saying he somehow should have known that I have driven a million miles in my life, and I mean an accurate estimate of the miles I've logged is ONE MILLION, in car, truck, towing heavy equipment, driving cube vans through Manhattan at rush hour, delivering pizza for Dominos, running trucks up scary mule paths to find old radio towers in the middle of Vermont; my family is filled with what I would say are good drivers, many better than me, but still, compared to the traffic cop calling over to me on this Sunday morning, I'm Mario Andretti. He has never driven a car. From 1987 to 2011, from thirteen years old to thirty-something, this dummy's life experience adds up to a ten-speed bike and four miles of rte. 25. He is of such a staggering stupidity that he can freely call out to a car, and tell them why they don't know how to drive. Next he'll take his 0 years of work experience, and become a foreman for some big construction firm, telling guys they're holding their hammers wrong. He's likely illiterate this guy, but I'm sure if you got him a bus ticket to Bowdoin, he'd alert the literature professors that they don't know shit about the art of storytelling, because he watches NCIS four hours a day on TNT. Who are these policemen? What makes them know so much about us? Who gave them this power? I know there are some real cops who are, to put it kindly, Douchebags, but also many who aren't. We all, who strive to be aligned, must understand at some level, society does have certain evils we accept, (or ignore if you like), but it's being real about the machine, and how it runs. The ironic thing is find me a man who really hates cops, and he's a secret policeman himself, with none of the knowledge, but all the desire, to steer everyone else right. These are the Hill People. What a scary bunch. Hill People sit in the hills waiting for the fisherman to take pity and walk up from the river with a couple extra trout. As the fisherman are leaving, as the Hill People gnaw madly at the fish, guts squirting out, (they don't know how to make a campfire, and cook the fish, let alone gut and clean them), as those fisherman walk on down the hill, the Hill People remark on how there are probably better fish if those jerks just knew where to look.
NY 24jul11
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