• You Are What You Watch

it reaches its destination. If I write a letter to a friend in the village a couple of miles away and drop the letter at the post office that is nearest my house, the letter gets taken all the way to Ellsworth, which is about twenty-five miles in the wrong direction. There it gets placed in either the right sack or the wrong sack, according to the way things are going in Ellsworth that day, and then it is rushed back across the county and goes down the road to the addressee. A better way, really, would be for me to take the letter in my hand and start out on foot with it, wearing a bright-orange cap so as to negotiate the deer crossings safely, and hand it to my friend. This would get me out into the air. Railroad passenger service has also been modernized in my state. This was accomplished by the simple, bold act of removing the trains altogether, which is about as modern as you can get and gives Maine the distinction of being the first state on President-elect Kennedy’s new frontier. Settlers are arriving every day in covered station wagons. The last train between Bangor and Portland ran on September 5th, and the last State of Maine Express, between New York and Portland, ran on October 29th. This about winds up railroading. I noticed, though, that when a group of Democrats visited Bangor on a campaign swing just before the election, they arrived in what was dubbed a “victory train.” They had hired a truck and fixed the back end of it to look like the rear platform of a whistle-stopping Pullman car. The gubernatorial candidate, Frank Coffin, stood on the simulated platform and advocated a plan for developing a “progressive spirit” in Maine, to keep talented young people in the state. I think progress has already been made in that direction; there is certainly no way a talented young person can escape from this area by rail, unless he wants to be crated and shipped out as a live animal. Over on Mount Desert Island, there has been a population explosion among white-tailed deer, and this poses a problem in game management. Hunting is illegal on the island, and the National Park Service people are faced with whittling down the deer population without killing any deer. The plan is to shoot about two hundred deer with tranquillizing pellets, capture them while they are tranquil, and remove them to the mainland, where they will be released in the woods, lose their tranquility, regain their suspicion, and then be shot in the normal manner by licensed hunters with real bullets. You must meet these modern problems head on. Of course, there are always a few deer that swim back and forth between Mount Desert Island, where hunting is illegal, and the mainland, where hunting is permitted. This constant movement back and forth keeps changing the population count in a very vexatious way, and it may become necessary to post extra skin divers beneath the surface along the principal water crossings. A deer will not be able to smell the frogmen, because of their being underwater, and the men can take a census by looking up from below. It is believed that if the tranquillizing program proves ineffective the deer on the island will be shot by game wardens with live ammunition, and the meat distributed to schoolchildren and hospital patients. This would save one step in the process of getting a piece of venison from the woods to the table. Thirty years ago, almost every house along this road was hooked up to a family cow. In summer you would see her in the pasture or staked out in a field; in winter her