“It’s a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That if you become a teacher,
By your pupils you’ll be taught.”
Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein wrote the words. Storyteller and retired teacher Leonard Hutchins demonstrates their veracity.
I just finished reading a book by Hutchins titled “Bon Homme” and paid him a visit at his Presque Isle residence to learn the story behind the story. The book portrays and weaves together two northern Maine traditions — logging and skiing — with such precise detail and authentic dialogue I felt it must be autobiographical.
Set in 1925, “Bon Homme” is a coming-of-age tale about a boy from Ashland who gets a job working as a “cookee,” or cook’s assistant, at a lumber camp in the Maine woods the summer after graduating from eighth grade as “salutatorian in a class of two.” Eddie Clark does not like school, but he is a quick learner and an inventive problem-solver who instantly wins the respect of the French-speaking logging crew he joins after walking 30 miles in one day to start his job.
They keep referring to him as “bon homme,” but he doesn’t know what that means. Fortunately, one of the loggers speaks English and not only explains that Ed’s new friends think he is a “good man” but also serves as a translator when the crew persuades Ed to read stories for them at the end of the day. He reads a passage, Andre Cyr translates it into French, the men discuss the passage and Andre summarizes their comments for Eddie. They go through “Tarzan,” “Treasure Island,” “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Eddie absorbs the insights of the older men, knowledge that serves him well when he is tested on the books later.
When the cook leaves his job and Ed’s mother and younger brother are brought in as cook and cookee, Ed becomes part of the crew, building a dam and learns one task after another, finding various ways to communicate and sharpening his ability to read body language.
“You know, I went to school eight years and thought I learned enough,” he says. “Now I’ve got to learn more, and I’m not even in school.”
Ed learns more than the skills of hewing logs and forging drill bits. The crew insists he train to compete in a snowshoe race against woodsmen from a neighboring operation. Anyone who can walk 30 miles in a day is worth betting on in the annual competition. As Ed masters snowshoeing, his brother, Jason, learns how to ski. By the end of the book, the two brothers are so fond of skiing, they envision a future as ski makers.
Even though Hutchins has skied and snowshoed since his youth and has spent summers working in the woods for the Maine Forest Service, he was quick to say no when asked whether he was telling his own story in “Bon Homme.”
“My students brought me the information,” he said. “The kids helped me out by sending their parents to parent-teacher meetings.”
Hutchins taught 18 years at Ashland Community High School —- “everything except high math and French,” he recalled. But most of his teaching was in English classes.
“I had a lot of French students from Portage Lake north,” he said. “The French kids thought they were dumb because they were French. They were ashamed of their French.”
It was important to Hutchins to convey in his book that “language has nothing to do with mental ability.” He said he would ask his French-speaking students, “How many languages do you speak?” When they said “two,” he would respond, “I only speak one. So who’s the dumb one here?”
Hutchins’ learned about logging by interviewing his students’ parents when they came for conferences. He learned that in Quebec, woods work was an honorable job, but when Canadian loggers came to Maine they were looked down upon. He wanted to know more, and his students said he should meet Maurice Bartlett. “Bon Homme” is Maurice’s story.
“Maurice Bartlett worked for Edouard LaCroix,” Hutchins explained, identifying the famous Quebec-based lumber company that employed 6,000 men at a time. “He told me what the north Maine woods was — the stoves, floors, ceilings,” and, of course, the logging business.
“As a scaler, he was a mathematical genius,” Hutchins continued. “His experience and eye were so good, he even surprised himself. He went from logging camp to logging camp scaling millions of board feet of lumber within 2 and 5 percent of being correct.”
Hutchins interviewed Bartlett during the 1970s. He also researched and wrote an article about the LaCroix lumber business that appeared in a 1977 edition of Down East magazine.
Well known for his series of tall tales by “Umcolcus Charlie” that appeared regularly in Maine Life magazine during the 1980s, Hutchins said he wrote “Bon Homme” a little at a time over the years.
“I had my students in mind when I wrote it,” he said. “The kids got me together with all this, and it seemed to stick together like so much hot gum — the LaCroix article, the students, their parents and Maurice.” Hutchins’ love of skiing resurfaced with the creation of the Maine Winter Sports Center in 1998, and he pays tribute to the center in his book for its efforts to put more kids on skis.
“A kid can’t go wrong if he (or she) can ski and snowshoe,” he told me. “They did big things for me.”
Once Hutchins started to put the story into words, it didn’t take long to write it. “I was pulling it together before I knew I was pulling it together, and it dawned on me: I have a story. It was all in place when I wrote it.”
He credits his daughter, Dottie Hutchins, and Mark Putnam, managing editor of several northern Maine weekly newspapers, for moving the manuscript into print last year. Illustrated by local artist Judy Sherman, the book is available at amazon.com and at Deep in the Woods Gift Shop in Oxbow, 207-435-6171, shop@deepinthewoods.org.
Kathryn Olmstead is a former University of Maine associate dean and associate professor of journalism living in Aroostook County, where she publishes the quarterly magazine Echoes. Her column appears in this space every other Friday. She can be reached at kathryn.olmstead@umit.maine.edu or P.O. Box 626, Caribou, ME 04736.