Tolkien Spoken Here
I spent my middle school years in the back-woods of South Central Maine. I guess that helped make me, in part, a Mainiac. We were living in Poland Spring, the scene of oh so many stories. Poland Spring was an old-world resort for the carriage trade of Boston and New York going back as long as 1794 when Hiram Ricker “discovered” that the combination of the fresh spring water, devoid of most of the minerals that gave other waters less than pure taste, the fresh mountain air flowing directly from Mount Washington to the west towards the craggy coast, forty miles to the east to Boothbay Harbor, and the pine-scented forrest, made the spot uniquely bucolic. Maine calls itself Vacationland for purposes of tourism promotion (at least it has on its license plates since 1936), and given that Poland Spring is not only the source of one of the largest branded bottled waters in America (it was THE largest in 2006), and home of the first eighteen-hole golf course in America (hard to verify, but certainly the first resort golf course built in America), it was a fine place to live during the formative years of my youth. I literally lived on the eighteenth hole, right at the spot here a sliced drive would thwack the side of our old clapboard house on Route 26.
In those days (1966 – 1968), the Poland Spring Resort was owned by Mr. Saul Feldman, who had leased the biggest buildings on the property (there were a gathering of about a dozen very old and very large resort buildings) to the U.S. Government via AVCO Corporation for the creation of the first women’s Job Corps Center, to house and rehabilitate 1,200 inner-city young women. My mother was the Deputy Director of that Center and ostensibly the resident general manager, since the Director chose to live in the more civilized area of Portland, about fifty miles away. Saul still lived in the “Big House” on the property and built a new Inn on Rt. 26 from which he held court and ran the golf course as a business (I’m sure the lease payments from AVCO financed that new build and the lifestyle of Saul and his family). I was friends with Saul’s grandson, the son of his son Lauren and the glamorous Tudi, whose name was Michael and who was three years my junior. He was literally the only other boy approximately my age on that hill during those summers, since the rest of the hill was dedicated to having hundreds of workers administer the needs of those 1,200 young Job Corps women.
It was quite an unusual setting undergoing a very unique and unusual cultural phenomenon (The Great Society of President Lyndon Baines Johnson) and I was mere flotsam on the tides of change. I caddied and worked on the golf course in the summer, canoeing on Middle Range Pond for amusement, and bused dishes at and learned to ski at the 2,000 foot TBar Poland Spring Ski Area during the winter. While I tend to think of having come-of-age in my next venue of Rome, Italy, where I spent most of my high school years, I think of Poland Spring, Maine as the place where my metal was softened and prepared for its ultimate forging. It was those pre-teen and early-teen years that helped me get my bearings.
One of the cultural fads in those days was the wearing of fun and sometimes funny lapel pins. It was a real trend to collect buttons with different, relevant and funny sayings. It was a sort of extension of candidate campaign pins and it was rampant. I don’t remember, nor have I saved most of those pins collected in those days, but the one pin I distinctly recall is one which read “Tolkien Spoken Here”. I think it may have belonged to my friend, Michael Feldman.
It was 1937, the year my mother graduated from Cornell, when John Roland Reuel Tolkien, CBE, FRSL wrote The Hobbit or There and Back Again, the tales of Bilbo Baggins as he traveled to the fantasyland of Middle Earth and returned to tell the tale. That book was so well received and was so much more than a children’s book as it was intended, that he went on in 1954, the year of my birth, to publish The Lord of the Rings trilogy, about the happenings of Middle Earth, that became a cultural phenomenon and the best-selling book and movies of its day. We all think that Harry Potter was huge, but consider that The Lord of the Rings sold 50% more copies than HP. Tolkien was the man when it comes to fantasy. His work is called “high-fantasy” and is about epic figures in epic tales.
Tolkien was popular immediately, but by the mid-1960s it was firmly rooted in the upbringing of most of America’s youth, and I was right in the middle of that mainstream. I wasn’t living in Middle Earth, but then again, my fantasyland was called Vacationland and the rural but old-world landscape of Poland Spring with its hills, valleys, swamps, lakes and historic old buildings, one more mysterious and ramshackle than the next, was as close to Middle Earth as anywhere in America. There were plenty of Hobbit-like creatures on the hill, which was a bastion of goodness as the place in America where The Great Society existed in microcosm and everyone was politically and socially-correct, ahead of its time in many ways, including the emphasis on feminine power. And surrounding that hill in places like Poland, Maine, Mechanic Falls, and the center of Maine’s old shoe industry, the twin-cities of Lewiston/Auburn, the evil forces of what we now think of as Red America lived and snickered at the liberals on the hill. That did not stop them from making commerce with the Job Corps and finding ways to get their piece of that pie, but when they went home to their lairs, they were like Gollum, cathecting about their little golden rings and bad-mouthing the liberals on the hill. It was a treacherous world surrounding The Shire of the hill, just like the dangers faced by the Hobbits.
So, imagine my surprise when yesterday during our News Years family FaceTime call, my daughter Carolyn said to me that my next project on my hill out here in Escondido should be the recreation of a playhouse she and my granddaughters encountered at the Ithaca Children’s Gardens. Now Ithaca, where I spent my post-formative years in college, and where I have maintained a home (Homeward Bound) for the past twenty-six years, is the closest thing to The Shire and the land of the Hobbits that exists in America today. The Utne Reader has called Ithaca the most enlightened community in America for many years now. It is no wonder there is a Children’s Garden with a small playhouse modeled after Bilbo Baggin’s Hobbit House, complete with thick plaster walls, little rounded door and gently curved green roof with plants and flowers growing across its crown.
Well, if that isn’t a red flag to a project-starved liberal bull with a Hobbit mentality, I don’t know what is. I am, if only in my imagination, Bilbo Baggins. I have the big feet, the good heart, the gentle manner (some of the time) and yet the adventurous spirit of Bilbo. I live on my liberal hill, surrounded by a sea of Red. I am half-brave and half-fearful. I thirst for adventure and travel, but revel in the comforts of my home. And now, I have a plan. My plan is already taking shape and I am recreating my own Moonstruck Hobbit House on my back hillside, hoping to have it built by the time my granddaughters come to visit my new Middle Earth in April. Casa Moonstruck is my Middle Earth and my hill is my Shire. So, by April, Tolkien will be spoken here.