Otherworldly Maine (11 page)

They rounded us up, put each of us in a different police car and Norm in the rescue truck, and headed off towards Auburn, with the helicopters keeping close escort all the way.

They were still asking us questions when the Canadian helicopters came in low out of the north and dropped in on the old Girl Scout camp, with their special forces and Mounties, to liberate Emma Tripp and all the others they had locked up there.

Norm was just a decoy. A lure to pull the Homeland Security guys out of the reeds and shadows and keep them busy while the real mission was on its way.

He was still telling them about that mysterious cloud—and we were still backing him up right up until the end. Until it was too late.

Eventually they let us go.

They told us not to tell anyone what had happened. They told us it wouldn't matter, because the newspapers and TV wouldn't be allowed to cover it. And they told us that if we did go talking about it, they'd take away our Social Security and put us in that Girl Scout camp.

But word got out anyway. It's hard to keep secrets up here.

And some thought we were heroes, while some thought we were traitors. But we were just a few old Mainers in the right place at the right time.

I
was there the night it all began, but the greater part of this story I've had to piece together over the years from reports of others, mostly friends of mine, who are usually pretty honest. It's customary in these situations to start by saying something like, “Verily, this tale is true.” At least that's how all the old books begin. They claim that the power of enchantment—whether a magical charm, or an eloquent poem, or a good story told around the table—is so great that it is able to overwhelm all of nature. I don't know about that, but just try saying “I love you” to someone for the first time and see how the world is changed, for good or ill.

Nostalgia, too, must be something like this. After a couple of decades, people look back on their college years and say, “That was a magical time.” Those folks are speaking figuratively and from a distance. What I'm trying to do is figure
out
some things, and thereby draw a little closer to the offbeat phenomena of the world, which, if they aren't magic in a literal sense are without a doubt “wicked,” as they say in Maine, “wicked weird.”

It was a college bull session. First day back for the fall semester and everybody was excited because there was a big football game the next day to kick off the new school year. A bunch of people were sitting around in the dorm lounge introducing themselves to each other or catching up on the summer's news with old friends. Among them was a new guy named Leo LaHapp, a freshman, who was on the cross-country team. Talk got around to the courses people were taking and a couple said they were enrolled in Early American History. So Barb Taylor asked, “Does anybody remember Virginia Dare? I just love that name.”

Virginia Dare, you may recall, was the first child born of English parents in the New World: August 18, 1587, on Roanoke Island in North Carolina. Not a good place to be from, all things considered, since not long after her birth everybody there disappeared without a trace. A few years later, when a long-delayed supply ship finally showed up from England, all they found were abandoned buildings overgrown with vines and a single word carved into a tree:
Croatoan
. Nobody knew what it meant, and there were no further signs of what happened to those unfortunate souls. All of them, including the baby Virgina Dare, were gone, never to be heard from again.

We were in Maine, so North Carolina seemed a pretty exotic topic—warm weather, sunny beaches, spring breaks—and it gave rise that evening to all kinds of fantastic speculations and associations. Somebody said that he knew of a bar called Croatoan—he thought that was the name—but it was down in South Boston. Somebody else said he was going to start a rock band and call it Croatoan. He imagined that none of the members in this band would ever take the stage and nobody would know what they look like; instead they'd play in some hidden location far removed from the audience and pipe in the music via speakers so it would all be very mysterious, and rumors could start that the band was really led by Jim Morrison, who hadn't died after all.

That's when Leo LaHapp spoke up. He wasn't called “The Bugman” yet. It was the first time anybody there had heard from him, so he was given the floor, and he surprised us by going on at length. Not a person in the room could have anticipated the succession of events after that. I realize that those of you who were there at the University of Maine will remember some of the incidents I'm about to recall—especially the infamous Witch Hunt—but so far as I know, the strange and disparate occurrences of those days have never been brought together in an adequate account. I don't make any great claims for my own story, but it must suffice until a more satisfactory version is put forth.

Anyway, Leo LaHapp launched into his story, telling the group—all of whom were strangers to him—that he had once been to Roanoke Island and had seen there a marble statue of Virginia Dare. It was sculpted in the nineteenth century by Maria Louise Lander, a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it was the most exquisite work of art he had ever seen. This statue was life sized, presenting Virginia Dare as a beautiful young woman, mostly naked, a detail Leo delivered with great relish. He described her as standing, scantily clad, in the midst of a fancy garden, with flowering trees and sweet-smelling shrubs all around. It was as if the baby Virginia Dare had somehow escaped from the ill-fated colony and had grown up and was now living in Eden or Arcadia or maybe, as Leo believed, Croatoan.

Then he spoke of a legend concerning this statue, how on certain nights of the year it comes to life and starts walking around. “If only it were so,” Leo sighed. “Something like that is very hard to believe, I know, and I don't go for it myself, but she does come to me in my special dream.”

That got a few snickers from the audience, but we all wanted to hear more about this special dream, so we encouraged him to continue.

“I'm at home and for some reason my family has this huge dead bear in the middle of the living room. It's stuffed like it came from the taxidermist, so I ask around but nobody can tell me why this bear is here. ‘Who killed it?' I keep asking my father, but he just tells me to go ask my mother, but I can't find her anywhere. Next thing you know, a big tree starts growing out of the bear's head. It's huge and already very old, even though it just sprouted. As it rises up, I think it's going to break through the roof of the house, but when I look up, there is no roof—it's gone and everything's just night sky with stars blazing and the tree soaring up there so high it looks like its leaves are the stars. Then way up there I see a woman swinging on a swing. She's naked and her skin is shiny white like marble. It's Virginia Dare. But she's not a statue anymore, she's alive and she's swinging and smiling and waving down to me. She wants me to climb up the tree, but the trunk is so big I can't get my arms around it. There's no place to grab hold. I get all upset because I can't climb the tree and I won't be able to go up there and sit on the swing and swing back and forth among the starry leaves with Virginia Dare. It's really frustrating. But she keeps swinging and smiling and waving down, as if to urge me on, so I try once more. Then I wake up.”

He finished his recitation by expressing the wistful hope that one day, if that statue of Virginia Dare really does come to life and go for walks, she might make the trip up to Maine and pay him a visit. “In the meantime,” he concluded, “at least I have my special dream.”

A couple of the women in the audience thought the story quite romantic, but mostly people just snickered some more and exchanged knowing looks or the cuckoo sign with each other. When some of the guys started teasing him about being in love with a chunk of rock, Leo just got up and left, insulted.

But the talking went on well into the night, moving away from Leo and his statue to related topics of magic potions and amulets. “Wouldn't it be fun,” Westphal suggested, “to find some way to grant Leo his wish and have that statue stop by and give him a thrill?” More plotting and scheming followed. At last somebody—I think it was Crilly Fritz (a real name by the way)—said: “Let's go find the Magician!”

The Magician was the nickname of a guy whose real name was For-rest Woodroe, an otherwise lackluster accounting major save for one curious fact: he came from a part of Maine that, at the time we're talking about, still had a vibrant folk tradition of magic. It was somewhere up near Solon or Carrabassett maybe. The joke around campus was that while other kids were growing up playing with dolls or chemistry sets, the Magician was concocting potions and working out incantations. The bookshelves in his dorm room were lined with volumes by Albert the Great, Cornelius Agrippa, and Giordano Bruno. Forrest regularly wrote cryptic letters to the college newspaper interpreting current events in light of the prophecies of Nostradamus, signing his bizarre messages with the penname Nick Cusa. Guys like this show up every fall on college campuses all across America. What separated Forrest Woodroe, what kept him from being just another freshman goofball, was the fact that people actually witnessed him alter the course of the 1975 World Series. It happened the year before I got there, but here's what they say about it.

Going into the sixth game of the series, the Red Sox are down three games to two against the Reds, playing at home in Fenway. Everybody in New England is barnacled to their TV screen. The game goes into extra innings. Now it's past midnight. Bottom of the twelfth and leading off for the Sox is Carlton Fisk. On Pat Darcy's second pitch—a low inside sinker—Fisk takes a mighty swipe. The ball goes soaring up in a meteoric arc toward the wall in left field. It's a crisis, a moment when the past has least hold on the present and the present has greatest hold on the future. The ball becomes a lifeboat with all of New England's hopes crammed into it, and it's drifting dangerously toward the foul line.

Fisk takes a tentative step down the line toward first; stops; watches. Time stops and watches, too. That's when the guys watching the game in the dorm lounge notice Forrest is standing performing this strange rhythmic motion with his arms, waving to the right as if to urge the lifeboat to keep from running afoul. Each wave is joined with a hop, so he's waving as he's bouncing his way across the room. Everybody's seized with wonder, looking at Forrest, when suddenly a loud “Hey, look!” rings out in the room. Eyes return to the TV screen, where Carlton Fisk is now doing the exact same thing as Forrest—waving his arms as he hops, in just the same fashion, even keeping exactly in sync. Three waves with three hops: whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. It is a very strange moment and it's going on even still: Forrest Woodroe leading Carlton Fisk in this weird dance across 250 miles and all of eternity.

But everything changes when the lifeboat hits the yellow foul pole above the wall—“Fair ball!”—and becomes a game-winning home run. The day is saved and Carlton Fisk is a hero! And to those sitting in the lounge of York Hall at the University of Maine on this faraway October night, so is Forrest Woodroe.

Even though the Red Sox would go on the next day to drop the ball and lose the series to the Reds, that sixth game—capped by Fisk's unforgettable performance—went down as the greatest in World Series history. And Forrest Woodroe, for his part, stepped into campus history and was known ever after as the Magician.

As for what went wrong with the Sox in that remaining game, the Magician had a role in that, too. Much to everybody's dismay, he was unable to make it back from some unspecified business in time for the game. The guys were counting on his working the magic one more time. They were plenty mad when he didn't show. Somebody even suggested that they burn the Magician at the stake for his failure, but death threats are ordinary in the mouths of disappointed Red Sox fans. Just ask Bob Stanley.

Cooler heads, though, prevailed that night in Maine, especially once it was reasoned that if this guy can sway the course of a World Series game, there's no telling what he might do to anybody who tried to mess with him. No one was willing to take that chance. Indeed, there are those who say that the Magician was so indignant about even the mild rudeness he suffered from those Red Sox fans when he finally did show up, that he put a hex on their team so they would never win another World Series. One can only conclude that this, combined with the Babe Ruth curse, adds up to some pretty potent hoodoo.

And so the Magician now enters this story about Leo LaHapp and the statue of Virginia Dare. I myself have no part in the rest of it, save for the gathering of details after the fact. I have to admit that I did play a small role in hatching the scheme that called for the Magician's services, and it was me who came up with the idea to carve
Croatoan
into the Hollow Tree, thinking it might work as a kind of navigation beacon for Virginia Dare—but I didn't think anybody would take it seriously. Come on, this was a bull session.

When those guys from the dorm lounge—including, among others, Crilly Fritz, Peter Snell, and a muscle-bound guy that everybody called Animal—went off looking for the Magician, I stayed behind and so did Westphal. For a little while we sat around trying to impress the women by making fun of how gullible those nitwits were. But then I got tired and went off to bed, leaving Westphal still trying to impress the women.

What went down next at the Hollow Tree came to light just this past Christmas—Westphal filled me in. Turns out the Magician was perfectly willing to help those guys help Leo get his girl. Carving the word
Croatoan
into the Hollow Tree was a great idea, the Magician said, but to cast an effective love charm—especially if it involved animating a marble statue—
that
would require a more formal ritual, for which the presence of all these guys was required. They eagerly agreed to it.