No Love for November
It’s still rough and incomplete, but here it is…
November has never been my friend.
When I was a child and we lived in the depths of the North Maine Woods, it was the single most hated month of my life. November meant hunting season and having to layer up in orange and stay close to the house. It meant a world stripped of color and often filled with freezing rain and mud. It meant indoor recesses with less escape, and most of all, it meant lumber camp guard duty.
You were mostly with me until then, right? We all know the barren suck fest that is November, but in my childhood it had an added layer. My family spent every weekend from early September through Thanksgiving driving deeper into the woods to guard whatever lumber camp my mother had been hired for that season. It was always kind of fun at first, but, every year, by November it felt like a prison sentence.
Something that you may know about the lumber industry: it involves a lot of equipment and supplies for a lot of workers. Something you may not know: hunters from away aren’t always great at respecting property when they are lost, hungry, bored, or drunk. Sometime during our early years up North it had come to my parents’ attention that there had been a series of break ins at the camps about an hour in from our house.
I’m not sure whose idea it was to offer up our services in order to earn a little extra money. It made sense, I guess; with my father’s job we stuck pretty close to home during hunting season anyway. So for most of grade school and middle school, I would get off the bus on Friday to immediately hop into our packed mini-van and ride several miles of muddy roads to simply be a presence at the lumber camp and deter any ill intent. I would then turn around and do it all in reverse on Monday morning, getting up at 4:30 am to head out of the woods and hop back on the bus.
I honestly have no idea what image comes to mind for most people when they hear the words lumber camp, since I can barely remember a time when I didn’t know what one looked like. Any images of picturesque log cabins that you might be harboring, I’m sorry to disillusion you. They generally somewhat resemble a small army barracks with a central mess hall surrounded by bunk houses and a ton of outbuildings to contain all of the equipment.They all smell of old socks and kerosene, and in the month of November they all feel cold and damp. We tended to jump back and forth between two camps. My favorite one was stick-built with a long mess haul that continued on into a long barracks. Even on the rainiest fall day there was plenty of room to run around and my mom would even occasionally let me bring my roller skates so that I could skate from one end of the building to the other until the noise drove her crazy.
My least favorite one was a series of single and double wides in various states of repair. Every building felt tiny and cramped. They were spaced just far enough apart that you got a good soaking running from the bunks to the mess, the latter of which felt like a tiny backwoods dinner; you had to turn sideways to get between the tables. The one saving grace of this space was the cook.
I never met the man in my life, but I swear without him I would have fallen into a total depressive state every fall we were posted there. This angel of a man knew my mother was bringing two somewhat unwilling young prisoners with her every weekend and would make extra baked goods for the men on Friday so that we had lots of delicious leftovers to gorge ourselves on over the weekend. Snickerdoodles, lemon bars, cherry pie. Every week the menu was slightly different. Except mince meat. Sadly, you could always count on there being left over mince meat. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of that cramped little kitchen, stuffing my face with lemon bars, playing UNO, with Billy Joel blasting in the background. As the years wore on, he and my mother developed a sort of back and forth without ever really seeing each other. We would peel and prep for him on Sunday night, he would make sure to squirrel away little extras for us and bake us the most amazing fresh bread on Friday morning. They left notes back and forth and each fall the goodies got to be more and more of our favorites. He even caught on and stopped making so much cherry pie, my sister’s favorite, once he found out it was down to just me.
And that was probably the year it stopped being any fun at all. Suddenly I was stuck there by myself and the whole fall felt like one long November. My sister is 8 years older than me, which means that she spent every fall of her highschool career stuck at the camps, poor thing. It also means that her departure from our house coincided with my first pangs of puberty. Interesting connection: 11 is, hands down, the most miserable age, to my mind, and November is the 11th month of the year. Coincidence? I think not.
My parents really did try to make it all more pleasant for me. There were a few weekends here and there where I managed to con a friend into joining me, but the isolation usually proved too much after just one weekend. There weren’t many repeat visitors. I also remember my father waiting around until the end of a couple of middle school dances to drive me in at midnight just so I wouldn’t miss out. They had learned their lesson with my sister
There were also a few interesting episodes every fall. Lost hunters to get sorted out, one memorable time when my mom had to tap into her folk medicine knowledge to help a hunter suffering from extreme constipation, and the time my mother decided I should know how to drive the mini-van at age 11 “in case of an emergency.” It didn’t end well, in fact I think it almost caused said emergency we were trying to avoid.
Eventually my mom got a job at the gate house that required her to start work at 4 am on Monday and Novembers went back to being filled with only the usual level of isolation and with the luxuries of video games, phone calls and sleepovers. The smell of kerosene still triggers some pretty potent flash backs, and I’ve still never quite succeeded in finding lemon bars quite as good as those at the lumber camp.
Now I try to spend my Novembers focused on gratitude. I’m grateful this particular November isn’t as rainy and miserable as many I remember, I’m grateful the view of the lake provides some beauty on even the bleakest days, and I’m grateful the Novembers of my childhood provided such weird and somehow wonderful formative memories. New goal for this November: introduce my son to the joys of Uno and Billy Joel.
Your writing is so evocative of time and place! Thanks for this memoir. My young years on a chicken farm in the boonies of Toms River New Jersey were also isolated and often dreary. So I relate.