Free Lunch In An Out of the Way Place

Two by Tom Seymour

Reviewed by Jack Oldham

Off The Beaten Path:
A Guide to Unique Places

By Tom Seymour
Morris Book Publishing
$14.95

Maine has its share of remote, different, and one-of-a-kind places.

Something similar might be said about some of Maine’s long and interesting history. Books about this history are not new and some of these topics tend to make it into most of these historical surveys.

Tom Seymour, however, is a man of eclectic interests and while there is the inevitable overlap with predecessors in the selection of items Seymour chose to include in this book, he has drawn in so much Maineacana that the most avid enthusiasts are bound to find new material.

Seymour writes about fishing, hunting, the outdoors and history for a number of publications.

The summer person, writer, eventual transplant, recorder of things Maine and universal, E.B. White wrote a book titled One Man’s Meat in 1942. (Recently republished by Tilbury House, Gardiner, Maine) The title suggests the remainder of the idiom which is, “Is Another Man’s Poison”.

Some people require the great find to be on the order of the mint '57 Chevy found in a barn for $500, the 1,200-pound bluefin tuna caught and filmed, the knockout coastal property where some revolutionary era guy got drunk and passed out by the fireplace one February night.

For Seymour a find can be what the rest of us have been unknowingly driving past for years, or a marker found in a distant wood that unlocks the tale of a long-vanished place of historical importance, or a way, way off the beaten path diner serving an ancient Maine dish cooked to what only someone like Seymour would know is perfection. In his book Off The Beaten Path Maine: A Guide to Unique Places, the reader gets not only the diner location and name of the dish, but how the dish is prepared, the origin, the historical significance and maybe a book to pick up on that bit of history. The advantage of course in this angle of view is the opportunity to find more wow moments and more interesting and real cultural experiences.

Seymour’s meat is the substance of Maine lives and places, past and present.

Drop this book on the floor, binding up, and whatever it opens to there are gems. This time it is page 72 and 73. A few of the dozen-plus items noted are “red flannel hash, Slate’s, a watering hole in Hallowell, the launching point of Benedict Arnold’s 1775 expedition, Reuben Colburn, builder of Arnold’s expedition boats, the 1949 A-1 Diner, Fort Western and an ingenious mouse trap.

The book’s seven chapters cover seven areas from southern Maine to The County. Every other page or so has a sidebar with factoids or favorites. Among notes on chairmakers, Edna St, Vincent Millay and the Camden Hills, on page 107, one such anecdote is titled Landsailing: “In 1830 a 30-ton vessel was built on the north side of Megunticook Mountain, in Camden. The vessel was hauled from there to Megunticook Lake and was then pulled another 6 miles over the ice to Penobscot Bay, where it entered the fishing and lime-hauling trades.”

Off the Beaten Path is a camp couch, coffee table, car console classic.

 

Free Lunch

Tom Seymour’s
Foragers Notebook

By Tom Seymour
Just Write Books, Topsham, ME 04086
$20.00

This book might best be described as a tool for developing personal menus based on the wild foods of Maine. Humans have been grazing in supermarkets for about 60 years, markets for about 100, and open markets like those we now call farmers’ markets for a few hundred to a couple of thousand years. Before the evolution of agriculture, now believed to be about 6,000 years ago, it was all grazing all the time on wild plants back hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years.

So what most people see as weeds or an unrecognized plant that is not grass or a pine tree today might be one of the foods our ancestors depended on for survival.

Which isn’t to say that some of these wild plants were not processed-dried, for off-season consumption.

Tom Seymour’s Forager’s Notebook is laid out simply. There is a page for every week of the year with descriptions of the plants available at that time at the beginning of each month along with a sketch of the plant. There is space for notes, a place to make sketches of what is found at the back of the book. Seven days are set out on a page with space for notes and Old Farmers Almanac-type words of country wisdom at the bottom of the page. Here’s one from the second week of April. “To distinguish fresh eggs from old stale ones, place in water. Eggs that float with the broad end up are bad.”

Each of the 12 months feature one plant. Not enough to toss the regular trip to the Maxi-Mart, but maybe the beginning of an interest in an alternative. Some readers will take this further than others. These foods are not totally free, they don’t drop themselves off at your back door. You have to go out and find them. However, many of them may be in the back yard or across the road in at the edge of a field. With the masters of the universe working their magic on the world economy these days, there may soon be quite a few of us along the edge of that field.