In early May 1973, John Mason and two friends drove overnight from New Jersey to Greenville, Maine, where they were to hire a seaplane to fly them into Horseshoe Pond for three days of trout fishing. With him were Gordon Meecham, or “Meech” as he was called, and Hoxie—just Hoxie, no first name. The trip had been Hoxie’s idea to begin with and it was his truck they drove up in.
The truck was a red 1962 Chevy pickup that Hoxie liked to cruise around in, wearing his fatigue cap from his recent time in Vietnam as an Army helicopter pilot. He always wore the cap. In fact he even slept in it. Some months back, Meech had started the rumor that he actually screwed with it on, and one young lady of but passing acquaintance who took it upon herself to verify the rumor later vouched for its authenticity.
For John and Meech, Hoxie’s cap was part of his style. He was free. He was outrageous. He was as disreputable as his shabby pickup truck. Yet he expressed a part of themselves they had somehow lost touch with, and on this trip he seemed to be making them whole again. Through the pre-morning darkness they chugged along on the hard bench seat. “Next time I take my Caddy,” Meech said at dawn somewhere in Connecticut.
“Wouldn’t work,” Hoxie retorted. “It’s too soft. A trip like this in a Caddy would be like going on vacation with the family. You drive and you get there—it’s that simple. And the place is mobbed with thousands of people and tame bears and transistor radios and kids running around in playgrounds and a McDonald’s on every corner. Jesus! You’ve got to leave all that behind you.”
They soon began to feel he was right. In Massachusetts, where they stopped for breakfast at a Howard Johnson’s, Meech got up and pledged allegiance “to all the Howard Johnsons of America and to the uniformity for which they stand.” That wasn’t bad for a program VP in a corporation with large defense contracts. Maybe they were beginning to leave something behind. Driving through the morning mist changed everything enough to make even commonplace objects seem new and adventuresome.
Soon after crossing into Maine at Kittery they noticed that the season here was less advanced than down in Jersey. They had left home in late spring, with the azaleas and dogwood in full bloom and a few hot summer-like days already behind them. Here, the grass was still young, the fields black with freshly turned soil, and new leaves just starting to color the hardwood forests.
By noon when they left the Turnpike the mist had let up, and under rolling clouds they traveled back into even earlier Spring, through Dexter and Abbot Village and Monson—where they stopped at the general store for their fishing licenses and some worms to use as bait—and on to Greenville itself at the southern tip of Moosehead Lake.
The air was chilly now. When they got to Folsom’s, where they were to hire the seaplane that would fly them in to Horseshoe Pond, they put on their winter jackets. A cold blustery wind swept across the water, and dark clouds tumbled at them from behind Squaw Mountain to the west.
WINTER SOON on Amazon US
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