Mark Nickerson is the first to admit he had quite a ride during his 28-year career as a Maine state trooper.
But he never thought he’d transition from that job to a new one as a writer, sharing tales gathered over the years.
“I hated paperwork,” Nickerson said with a laugh. “The worst part of being a trooper was doing paperwork.”
Mining tales from his memory banks and a daily log he was required to keep, Nickerson released his second book, “Behind the Blue Lights: More Real-Life Stories from a Maine State Trooper,” last fall, through North Country Press in Unity.
Nickerson credited former Belfast-area newspaper editor Beth Staples for discovering the fledgling writer.
Staples had been publishing stories by Nickerson’s pal, retired game warden John Ford Sr., and many of those tales had a common thread.
“He was throwing insults at me in all of his stories,” Nickerson said. “After hearing them so many times, Beth called me and said, ‘You must have a story about John.’ I said, ‘How many do you want?’”
That was back in 2004 or 2005, Nickerson said. After that, Staples ran Ford’s column one week and Nickerson’s the next.
“We sparred back and forth in the paper for seven or eight years,” Nickerson said.
Those columns have provided the content for both Nickerson’s books and three penned by Ford.
In “Behind the Blue Lights,” Nickerson tells a variety of stories. Some are poignant and illustrate the potential consequences troopers may face every day. Others feature Nickerson’s favorite foil, Ford, and are hilarious. Still others have been passed along to the writer by others with interesting law enforcement tales.
The end result is a veritable police blotter — without the good stuff redacted — that leaves readers shaking their heads, often thinking, “I wish I could have been in the back seat to watch that one unfold.”
The names — except for a few colleagues, such as Ford — have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent, and Nickerson clearly strives to keep the tales at a PG rating. And while some of the stories were plucked from his daily logs, many simply emerged during regular bull sessions with former colleagues.
“When you start meeting up with your trooper friends or law enforcement friends, you’d start telling war stories, and that would trigger other memories,” Nickerson said. “That’s where most of my stories came from.”
Nickerson is proud of his career as a state trooper, during which he removed more than 1,000 drunken drivers from the state’s roads. Those episodes often show up in his stories, and each is different.
Even as he recounts those stories, though, Nickerson is able to laugh at the situations he found himself in and able to realize that even many of the lawbreakers he arrested had redeeming qualities.
“It’s not that everybody’s a bad person who drinks and drives. It’s just a person who made a bad decision,” he said. “And I always treated everybody with respect. … I wouldn’t want any bad-assed cop coming up to me and being pushy.”
Nickerson retired from the Maine State Police in 2005. Since then, he and Ford have parlayed their local literary success into another part-time career, as they keep a busy schedule speaking to interested audiences across the state.
“We go mostly to libraries and historical societies and groups. John and I just tell our stories,” Nickerson said. “It resonates. It’s mostly humorous. There’s some poignant parts to it, but it’s mostly funny and we love to see people laugh.”
Especially, it seems, at each other’s expense.
“It’s working, and we haven’t had too many complaints,” Nickerson said. “Mostly [the complaints] are about John.”
