During the 1980s, Bud Simpson began writing down tales from a childhood spent near Johnson Brook in North Brewer. The tales eventually would make a pretty good book, he thought.
“You know what happens when you start something,” Simpson said on Friday. “Life gets in the way. So then you go out and go to work and get back to [writing the book] in a little bit.”
A little bit turned into a longer bit. Years passed. But Simpson did get back to finishing his book. Readers will be glad that he persevered.
Called “Mantawassuk: The Cove,” Simpson’s first published book is a well-crafted 117-page collection of adventures from his youth. Photos are included in the back of the book, including aerial shots of the places he describes.
Simpson, who grew up in North Brewer but now lives in Logan, Ohio, says the book is not a memoir. Writing such a personal story, he says, would have put the focus on the poverty he, his brother and his mother endured. Instead, he chose to emphasize the activities that he enjoyed as a child.
Those largely took place in “The Cove” where Johnson Brook — also known locally as Eaton Brook — dumps into the Penobscot River.
Simpson’s prose is simple and direct, but the stories he tells resonate with readers who remember their own forays afield as adventurous youths.
Most remarkably, even 70 years after some of the incidents took place, Simpson manages to recapture a childlike enthusiasm as he describes the outdoor activities that filled his days in the 1930s and 1940s.
Simpson crafted his own fishing pole out of a massive, unwieldy piece of wood. He spent days building a raft that sunk to the bottom of the cove after its launching. And he threw rocks at any piece of flotsam that drifted past.
“When I stop and think about it, I must come to the conclusion that a great deal of my younger life was spent throwing stones and other objects into bodies of water of one kind or another,” he wrote on Page 45.
If that passage doesn’t ring true to you, you surely didn’t enjoy a rural Maine upbringing. If it does, Simpson may as well be talking about you.
But Simpson said he thinks the rock-throwing passage may resonate with aging “youths,” no matter where they grew up.
“I think if you get a boy and put ‘em near a body of water anywhere in the world, and there’s a rock around, he’s going to throw it in the water,” Simpson said with a chuckle. “They make a very satisfying sound when they hit.”
Another amusing story involved Simpson’s ill-fated attempt to build a raft. Doing so, he reasoned, would give him a chance to catch fish that stayed in the deeper water where the cove merged with the Penobscot.
After days of labor, he launched the raft. The raft sank. And there (Simpson assumes) it still sits, more than 60 years later.
“As far as I know there’s probably 3 feet of silt over the top of it now,” he said. “Some archaeologist will dig it up 1,000 years from now and say, ‘He came from a raft-building tribe.’”
Simpson said his manuscript languished for two years at a publishing house before it was returned to him. He then decided to publish the book himself.
“I said, ‘God, [in] four or five years I might not be around here,’” he said. “It might not even be that long. I’m 76 years old, or I will be in December.”
Simpson opted for a print-on-demand publisher, which means he didn’t have to pre-order a specific number of books.
“You don’t have to buy 500 or 1,000 books at a time,” Simpson said. “You can buy one, or a hundred, if you want. That does leave you with some problems for distribution, so you have to get out and push it a little bit.”
That’s what Simpson was doing this week, as he returned to Maine and told as many people as possible about his book.
Simpson said publishing the book is the culmination of a longtime dream.
“All my life, one of my ambitions was to be an outdoors writer. But it never worked out quite that way,” he said. “Like I say, life gets in the way of your dreams sometimes.”
Now, though, Simpson has achieved his goal. He’s a published author. He’s an outdoors writer. And his tales finally have been told.
“The main drive was to try to [talk about] nature rather than the poverty,” Simpson said. “But it was because of the poverty that I was so involved with nature, I think. It worked out pretty good for me. I’m still here.”
To order or learn more about “Mantawassuk: The Cove,” go to www.xlibris.com, www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com, or call 888-795-4274, ext. 7879. The book also is available in some local bookstores.
