Only a few days remain of deer season, which ends with the month. I have seen very few deer draped across cars and heard of few kills, but no doubt a good number have been taken. Every state seems to have a deer population explosion; so much as we dislike the thought of slaughter, it seems necessary. Orange caps on people and orange bibs on dogs keep us aware of the hunting season.
There are plenty of deer around, but they disappear when hunting season begins, I recall driving to New York on the Taconic the day after the season ended, seeing several of them beside the road watching the traffic, and no doubt having a good deer laugh at having survived once again.
My father's deer hunting days ended after spending a winter on survey camp in Glacier Park, where they fed the deer.
This is written the week before Thanksgiving. Here in western Maine we have had three small snowstorms, most of which has disappeared. The local snowmobile club, the Sno-Wanderers, is putting trees along the bridge, and they will be hooked up and ready for lighting on Thanksgiving. Every town, large or small, has its own snowmobile club. They groom miles of trails and have weekly potluck suppers - altogether a happy, busy group. Maine really enjoys winter! There are 280 clubs, 250 of which belong to a state group. These clubs have 12,000 individual members, not including family members, There are 10,000 miles of groomed trails, possibly more.
These clubs control their members very well, and each year the number of casualties goes down. The little machines are capable of high speeds, making it tempting to travel fast, especially for young members. If the summer watercraft drivers on lakes can develop equally good rules, it will be a relief to summer residents.
I sometimes get the feeling that Maine is almost a separate country from the other states. There is a strong "booster" attitude, most evident in public radio and television programs. One program host, Lou McNally, has a long-running program called "Made in Maine," in which he travels around the state to smallish factories that make mattresses, teddy bears, lobster bisque, croquet mallets, handwoven blankets - on and on, items shipped to every state in the union and overseas as well. Family loyalties permit me to report that one of his most popular segments was on daughter Susan's Stanley Museum here in Kingfield.
There is also a very visible governor, Angus King, who appears on a television program with an excellent and non-biased reporter and equally broad-minded commentator. This was particularly evident in the recent election that included a referendum on the forestry question about clear cutting. Stronger opinions were expressed in the Maine Times, where all sides are offered. The governor's compact was defeated, apparently because a man who is a big investor in a huge Canadian company, which wants the lumber business for overseas clients such as Japan, donated impressive amounts of money to the Jonathan Carter ban-clear cutting program.
The long-running battle over forestry uses was difficult to decide, since both sides claimed to be protecting the forest and landowners. In that sense, I guess Maine is no different from the rest of the country!
Well, I guess we could all think of plenty of things to be thankful for in spite of that. Personally, I shall be thankful by the passage of time to get a cast off my left wrist, placed there to stabilize a broken bone from a recent innocuous slip in the snow. As a result, I have had to write the foregoing random thoughts with the hunt-and-peck system - no doubt the way many other computer uses do who never learned to type. It is amazing how dependent we are on two hands. I did discover that the elbow can be very helpful, but not with buttoning shirts or opening cans of dog food!
So on we go toward Christmas. May you all have a jolly, sociable season.
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