By Zach Brockhouse

Up Highway 17 past Mount Pleasant, the land was choked with vegetation. The plants were barbed and poisonous and could grow several inches in a day. Scrub oaks tangled with Sumac. Honeysuckle battled Kudzu. Sawgrass covered every inch of the ground, blades that would cut hands and knuckles, raise painful, itching hives.

Native Americans used to live there. They grew corn and sat on the black sand shores to watch the big European boats coming in. They were the Wando, the Yemassee and the SeeWee tribes. The Europeans were introduced to poison ivy and hornets. The Indians were introduced to worse.

By the time the Revolutionary War began, these tribes were on their way out. The Francis Marion Forest was named for a man they called, “The Swamp Fox.” Most people thought of him as a hero, though there were rumors that he hunted Indians for sport and raped female slaves in his spare time.

This morning we stop at the last outpost before Awendaw and the Francis Marion, a doublewide trailer attached to a bright yellow house. We load up on Mountain Dew and chilidogs. We eat them quickly while Chief gasses up the truck.

The newer looking Diesel pump always has a rough looking trucker parked by it. He sits in the cab, his legs bone-white beneath his shorts and watches us from behind mirrored sunglasses. He smokes and probably wonders what the hell has brought us this far north. We’re lost, he thinks. Maybe crazy. The rips in our pants and the stained shirts, the sunburned necks, the rashes and bites that line our arms make us look like lepers, escaped and sun blinded, stumbling here of all places and no doubt looking for trouble.

The Civil War freed the slaves. One hundred years later, their descendants lined the highways weaving sweetgrass baskets under plywood huts. The tourists came down from the northern beaches to haggle, barking numbers in thick Yankee accents. The weavers watched the cars pass with looks of boredom so profound they could only be matched by the faces of the white children staring back at them.

We’re excited today. Instrument Man won’t be working the gun. I won’t be carrying the heavy tripod over fences and through vines. We have the company’s first GPS, and we’ll simply have to walk around the wetlands with a backpack, a battery pack, and a transmitter. The transmitter is a plastic disc on a pole you can raise above the overgrowth to clear sky.

There is the man who for the better part of fifteen years has been sitting underneath a painted plywood sign that ended up too short to finish. It reads, Boiled P-Nut. He waves as we pass. He still ain’t sold that peanut, Chief says every morning.

We pull across 17 to the access road. We stop at a rusted gate and he gets out to unlock the padlock. I hold the gate while the truck passes and close it behind. I hop onto the tailgate. It’s barely a road with trees grown so close they scrape the sides of the truck, joining the legions of criss-crossed scars from thousands of other roads just like this one, old and forgotten hunting trails and deer runs.

We put on our snakeboots, tuck the pants into them and soak the area in OFF to keep the ticks out. I tuck my shirt in and spray my waist the same way. The chemicals make the cloth feel crisp and cool and the smell will stay with me for most of the morning, a burnt sweet chemical smell that makes the hair on my arms rise.

We find the first pink flag left by a state worker and match it with the ledger Chief has. I raise up the disc and wait for the little numbers to line up and record our position. It’s early days for GPS and it takes a while for each position to be register. We all stare at the numbers and the little LED dots blink until we’re done. Gnats find Chief’s head in the sun and buzz around his ears, some stick to the sweat already coating his neck.

Then we head in, following each flag with a number written on it. This brings us deep into the wetland and the sun dappled pines and honeysuckle give way to a musky cool darkness. The ground opens up and the vegetation changes. I can name every tree I see. Garden Spiders wave between them wherever there is sunlight. They are big spiders. Yellow and black with vertical stripes in their web. They rock back and forth whenever you get too close. Chief occasionally throws them a cricket and we watch as the spider strikes and wraps it up.

It’s nine a.m., but already hot. Eventually around noon even the crickets and frogs will give up and it will become very quiet. We sit around and wonder whether it’s best to go back to the truck to try and catch a nap, play some Hearts—or keep going to the last flag.

We decide to keep going. Pass around the canteen. Light a sweat soaked cigarette, with a lighter that hisses and pops.

The further in we go, the higher I need to raise the disc. Eventually, I resort to waving it back and forth hoping this will induce whatever satellites we’re trying to communicate with to notice us. Leaves and twigs fall around me as I try and shove it through.

Chief and Instrument Man haul their bush axes from their shoulders, axes Chief sharpens religiously every morning with a file. They begin to furiously cut away vegetation to give the disc a clear path to the skies. Animals buzz warnings and for a little while the sleepy little swamp wakes up. Vines and brambles fall. I get a reading and yell out to stop. They lean on their axes and watch me watch the numbers. The numbers blink. Three sets of them need to register to move on. Sweat runs off my eyebrows. It doesn’t drip. It runs like my head is on fire and the quickest way out is over my eyes. I watch until the third number clicks and I lower the disc so I can move without getting tangled.

We finish our numbers and find another old logging road that Chief swears will get us back to the access road which will lead us back to the forsaken little strip the truck is parked on.

We’re hot. We’ve run out of water. We walk in a loose single file through runs made by pig and deer. We know this is where the ticks are, but no one wants to cut a path.

The Civil War is still alive down here. You can hear it in the way people speak, in how neighborhoods are drawn, and the ethnic lines are as clear as fresh chalk. The further out from the cities you get, the more visible it becomes. Chief brings out his metal detector in these spots and the wooden crates of his handmade tool box are alive with slave chains and grapeshot.

Around a corner, parked in a patch of shade blocking the road, is a little camper. We stop, the sight of it striking us for a moment into immobility. Its back is facing us. The sides have been crudely painted to look like a log cabin. Around the little window cut into the sheet metal side, a wooden window sill and a pot of geraniums have been painted.

We approach it wary. Instrument Man scratches at the bandaged Sumac boil on his forearm. Closer to the front, painted in bright green letters that look like Lincoln Logs reads, “Honest Abe.”

Through the driver’s window, a man is asleep. A gas station Styrofoam coffee sits in the filthy arm rest. He’s got a black beard with no mustache. He’s wearing a black tuxedo tee shirt. A road map sits coffee stained and curled on the dashboard. An unzipped duffel bag is on the seat by him, stuffed with clothes and a stovepipe hat. Several pairs of socks are draped over the open passenger side window.

We try to see to the sleeping area in back, but a half closed curtain keeps it from view. The curtain is made from a brown towel. Hyatt Regency is sewn into the corner.

He’s sleeping soundly. Up close he really doesn’t look like Abe Lincoln. He looks like the truck drivers that watch us at the outpost. To save some money on hotels, he’s found this faraway place to catch up on some sleep. I look for the porn magazines hoping to find an explanation for the inordinate amount of porn you find rotting in the faraway fields and wetlands. It’s everywhere, long-abandoned houses, tree trunks. I never go a week without finding some. But he has none. I wonder if he has family back where he came from. I wonder if they miss him.

We leave him sleeping there, find the truck baking in a sun that has moved since morning. We drink ice water standing around the orange cooler and pack up. The shadows are getting longer. The crickets and frogs are beginning to wake.

A corporation was planning to build there. For every wetland they filled in, they would have to build the equivalent elsewhere. Usually these took the form of a scraped together pond or a wet patch between two cement pipes where frogs would gather in the evenings. Sometimes a wetland would be saved when a rare woodpecker would nest there. Usually not. Eventually the whole area would become a business park.

I hope Abe moved in time. Maybe his camper’s still there underneath it all. Maybe someone else will find him in a hundred years.

Photo provided by Zach Brockhouse.

By Peter Morningstar

I’m a pediatrician. I work primarily in Presque Isle, Maine, for a big practice that probably doesn’t really need me, but where I make a modestly meaningful impact, while not overworking myself, spending plenty of time with the family, and having the opportunity to do things I enjoy, like four wheeling and mountain biking, playing hockey, and writing.

I used to work full time in Machias, Maine. Machias is an Indian name that means Bad Little Falls. There is a Bad Little Falls in Machias, where the Machias River goes over a series of ledges next to the Main Street corridor. It’s not a super big drop, and it’s easy to miss if you are in a car on Route 1, but there is a lot of water going through a narrow curve, and it looks pretty, and pretty rough. You see all this if you wander out behind the Mobil station and look over the embankment.

I asked my buddy Dave Whitney who is a big kayaker and canoer, and owns several businesses in town, if he had ever run the falls and he looked taken aback. He arched upright, his glasses slipped down his nose, and his eyes opened wide and wild. “Nooo.  No.  Nooo…” Too rough? I guessed.  “Oh it’s rough, and it’s a good drop for a raft, let alone a kayak or a canoe, but the biggest problem is there’s eddies in there that would suck even a raft down, and the falls are full of metal posts from back in the days they ran logs down the river. A person would get shredded in those falls.” Anyone ever done it? “If someone did he hasn’t been back bragging.”

I worked for the hospital there in Machias, and it was a Bad Little Hospital. I don’t mean bad like low quality, or poorly equipped; I mean bad like terrible, like rough and mean, like the Machias River Falls: small, kind of cool looking, tempting, and filled with old sharp steel. I remember when I was a nerdy kid, being attracted to the tough girls my mother didn’t even bother to warn me against, the girls who smoked and glared at passing cars by the high school my mother wouldn’t send me to anyway. The hospital in Machias was like those girls.  The doctors there had been warring amongst themselves for years, and warring against the hospital administration for even longer. The nurses if anything were even more out for blood than the doctors. It seemed like every indiscretion, no matter how mild, was reported to a state licensing board. When I interviewed, there were three pediatricians, when I arrived there was just one… Pediatricians had come and gone and come and gone. I lasted the longest, four years, the first year and some, and for various stretches later on, all by myself. I can’t imagine what moved me to want to move there, but I was excited to go. I like to be needed.

Of course I finally gave up and left three years ago. The family didn’t like the town so much.  There’s not much to do in Machias, no movies or mall, no ice rink or ski hill to make the winter go by, and too many biting insects to enjoy the summer much. Like the Falls, it’s pretty to look at, but not a place to immerse your family, unless they are really good at making their own fun, and not bothered much by black flies and mosquitoes. On a bright Autumn day, or in the Spring when the snow is melting and the flies are still sleeping, it may be the prettiest place in the world. It is kind of a Bad Little Town that way, a place my mother would never have thought to forbid. We were all relieved to move somewhere less Bad and less Little. Presque Isle is isolated, but you can ride your snowmobile right up to the mall, and the bugs are scarce.

Since I left town, the hospital in Machias has improved some.  I don’t take the betterness following my departure at all personally. An inpatient had wandered out into a storm after arguing with staff and froze to death in the snow, sparking a state and federal investigation that toppled the last administration. Since then the hospital has gone to some lengths, and with some success to get less Bad, if not less Little.

Actually, even after we cleared out I couldn’t tear myself away completely. I still go down there every four weeks for two days to look after the kids from that Bad Little Town. In part because in three years no one has stepped in to replace me. My friend Alf is an excellent physician assistant who handles almost all the pediatrics there and does a fine job.  But the role of assistant by its nature demands an assistee, and that person is still me. I drive three and a half hours each way from our home in Caribou down the loneliest stretch of highway in the east to Machias every fourth week, work like a madman for two days, then load up on caffeine and head home.  One trip in the snow two years ago I saw only seven vehicles out for the whole 175 mile run: four plough trucks, two pick ups, and a border patroller.  That was when the mill in Baileyville was shut down and the log trucks were all parked. I almost always stay with friends there those Thursday nights. The truth is that the friends I met in that Bad Little Town, and the patients I treat at that Bad Little Hospital, are about the best friends, and most loyal patients a person could have. It’s funny that such good people can be found so far out along the edge of nowhere, and that is why I keep going back to that Bad Little Town, even three years after we escaped. I can’t help myself. I love the place.

By Michael T. Heath

I’d been working in the company test garden all morning—checking on water lines; picking stray potato beetles by hand. In one corner stood the latest composters under development. I liked the rain-catching pyramid, but alongside that one sat a barrel-shaped tumbler on a slippery base. This one just begged to be turned each time I passed, and I obliged it, rolling the food scraps and garden trimmings yet again. My invention had been the foot ‘steps’ which allowed no-hands compost turning. I’d also helped design the rain-catching lid on the square one (patents for both were in the works). A little further in the garden I looked over our tomato crop, ripening nicely. A hinged trellis around each plant was another of our new products, made to slide over the tops of full-grown plants. I stopped to run my hand along the red, vinyl-coated surface of the sturdy tomato holder. These should sell well, I thought. They’ll stand out in a marketplace full of cheap green ring supports that weren’t designed to fit over big plants. My eyes moved down the row and settled on a rusting spike marked off in inches. It stood 30 inches tall (as measured by the gradients), and told the owner how much snow had accumulated. The snow stake had a fatal flaw as a product, in my eyes. It was topped by a sunburst pattern, complete with individual rays poking up from the top of the stake. The sample I had put out had already begun rusting in just a few weeks. But I could imagine a worse outcome—one which exposed the company to real liability. Since I was charged with discovering just such problems during product testing, I was determined to torpedo the snow stake before it made it into the gardening catalog my company put out.

Just before noon, the managers assembled in the conference room. A few of them carried mock-ups of the upcoming catalog in black-and-white, while others had folders bulging with color pictures of past hot sellers and the pet favorites they were hopeful to place. There was a general anarchy of voices and shuffling as folks acquired seats and valuable table space to spread out their materials. Barely noticed, I wheeled in a cloth-shrouded cart and parked near the door. In my left hand was a generous pumpkin about the size of a large basketball. A few of the managers took note that I was in the meeting and nodded towards me. The meeting was quickly called to order by the company president. He handed moderating duties off to the marketing director who was readying the next catalog. She thanked everyone for coming to the meeting and told them I would be giving a brief presentation before they got underway. I nervously wheeled my funky cart out from the wall for all to see. It stood approximately four feet tall with a white sheet draped over something pointy in the middle. I began by saying that I had been asked to test a new product idea and that I felt it was one of the most dangerous things to come along since I’d started. At this point I raised the ripe pumpkin above my head. “Imagine you’re walking along in your backyard. It’s winter, and there has been a lot of snow. You stumble on some tool left out in the yard…” I smashed the pumpkin down on top of the cloth-covered spike in the wagon, getting it to penetrate completely through the gourd. I then pulled back the cloth to reveal the rusty snow stake, neatly impaling my fresh pumpkin. I looked around the room to see more than a few startled faces. Only one showed annoyance: my boss, head of product testing and close to the marketing director. It seemed that my show and tell time was up, so I gathered up the pumpkin parts and my death spike and beat it out of there. The smashed veggie went into the composter. The snow stake returned to its spot in the test garden and immediately continued rusting. Throughout the day, I carried the feeling that I had done a good thing in the meeting.

The next morning I was summoned into the office. A stern boss asked me why I had felt it necessary to intrude on the manager’s meeting with my demonstration. Normally I’d submit a report to marketing, who’d make a final decision on what we sold. I tried to explain that I had done the report but was concerned that this item was super-dangerous, and wanted to make sure the people who had the authority to choose didn’t choose this one. “Well, they have decided to carry the snow stake anyway. It sold well in our competitor’s last winter catalog.” That was the beginning of the end, for me. Within the year I was out. My numerous product inventions live on, printed quarterly and mailed to every state.

Photo provided by Michael T. Heath.