10/8: Mo and Merrill, part the last

Over to Southwest and Ellsworth for a little shopping and a follow-up for Jude with the ophthalmologist. While waiting to be seen, she read a magazine article about “tail-gate barbecue” which mentioned Moe’s Bar-B-Cue & Grill of Ellsworth, ME.
We visited Moe at his converted cook-trailer, a permanent set-up in the Ellsworth town beach parking lot on the Union River just south of Main Street. A pair of bald eagles slowly circled in the thermals above the boat launch. People were sitting on benches by the boat launch, eating lunch in the unseasonably warm sunshine.
Moe offered full- and half-racks of ribs ($25/15), pulled pork sandwich ($5), and spaghetti with bar-b-cue chicken sauce ($5). He is originally from Boston with family from the deep South, and he moved up to Baileyville, two hours further north on route 9 near Calais, several years ago to “get away from the madness.” He says you have to get down to simple things, things that make you happy, like good food and time to use as you please. He was about to close up, turn off the gas and drain the trailer for the season, so we were just in time.
The pulled pork melted in your mouth, sweet with a little heat, but I could have done without the ShurFine hamburger roll. Next time, just a bowl of pulled pork.

Moe and His Barbe-Cue

We stopped by to see Merrill on the way out to Sutton. He was minding Percy again, who turns out to belong to Richard Stanley. Percy comes to visit a couple times a week while Richard is working at his boat shop down the street.
Merrill lives in a large two-story home with a Tudor roof that sits on what must be one of the most desirable lots in Southwest Harbor, a half-acre or so with views of the harbor on three sides of neatly kept property. There is a meticulously piled set of four dozen or so wooden lobster traps in the backyard which haven’t been fished since the last time the Phillies won the World Series. You find traps like these sitting in front of seafood restaurants and junk shops, but nobody’s fished wooden traps for twenty years. In fact, I don’t think you can even find anyone who can still get the cedar slats to build them. They are valuable artifacts, though, and Merrill has small troop of plastic superheroes there to keep an eye on things. He has other superheroes inside, sitting on tabletops and cabinets, hanging from the ceiling, perched on the antenna of the weather radio.

Merrill’s Traps with Guardian Super Heroes

There is a red Nissan pickup parked in front of a small tar-papered garage. In back are the traces of an old set of wooden ways below the bank in the backyard on which Merrill’s father used to haul up his boat, many years ago, and “the dead dinghy,” half-buried and rotting in the mud.
Merrill’s parents were born, as he was, on Great Cranberry. They met there, married and came over to Southwest in 1936, when they bought the house he is now living in, on Clark Point Road. Everyone on Great Cranberry had a nickname. His father’s nickname was Boots, so Merrill naturally became Sonny Boots.
Merrill’s parents died many years ago, his mother in 1974, his father a number of years earlier, and he has lived alone in the house ever since. Many things in the house seem unchanged, and in some cases, untouched, over the last thirty years, and there is a heavy patina on all the walls from the tobacco smoke from Merrill’s cob pipes. You can see the negative outline of a cuckoo clock on the wall behind him in the picture of Merrill and Percy taken in the kitchen. He spends much of his time indoors sitting in the kitchen in much-repaired rocking chair his mother bought in the 1950’s, the arms of which are secured with many turns of kitchen string.
-This chair’s about had it, he remarked at one point.
-Merrill, where’d you go to high school?
-Right here, in Southwest.
-Are there many of your schoolmates still living in town?
-No, not too many. I hardly know a hundred people in town any more. Not many people working on Mt. Desert Island live here anymore – people drive a hundred miles a day round-trip from off-island to get to work.

Merrill & Percy

The taxes on Merrill’s house had been climbing for years as local properties were bought up by off-islanders. This was worrying him quite a bit since his income is limited to the modest retainers he gets for minding the summer homes on Sutton plus a little social security. He watched as his neighbors were displaced as “rich people from away” bought one modest working-family property after another in Southwest, in the process driving his taxes from $650 in the early ‘nineties to over $10,000 today.

Last winter, Merrill’s cousin in North Carolina bought the house and made provision for Merrill to live there for the rest of his life. This took a heavy weight off his shoulders. The house was sided with vinyl then and he removed all the pictures from the outside walls of his house before they started hammering. They are still waiting to be re-hung.

The furniture and knick-knack cases in the front sitting room are also pulled away from the outside walls, sort of piled in the middle. There is a silhouette cutout drawing of him from grade school hanging on the inside wall and Jude picked up a framed black&white high school yearbook photo of a handsome young Merrill she replaced on the shelf. Merrill had taken us into the sitting room to show us a ship’s clock he was very fond of he had gotten from his aunt. At the foot of an ancient recliner was a box of liquor he had picked up when one of the homeowners on Sutton sold his place, five or six years ago.

-I tell him, Tom Cox, I’m still holding it for him, this liquor, when I see him. He says he’ll stop by and pick it up next time he’s in Southwest, but so far he hasn’t. Mr Cox is very generous to me, he still sends me $6000 each year, same’s he did when I was taking care of his place out on the island even though he hasn’t owned it for some time now.

There is an extensive collection of little metal and plastic cars on the shelves of a small bookcase in the living room. His kitchen is a jumble of canned beans and Campbell’s soup cans he eats for dinner while standing over the gas stove he’s heated them on. He says he heads over to the lunch wagon in Bass Harbor most days for a couple lunchtime hot dogs.

Merrill is a keen reader of history of all periods and a devoted viewer of the History Channel.

Each time we visited Merrill he had a little treasure waiting for us, usually something he had found in the consignment store or the dump. The town of Southwest Harbor, by the way, maintains one of the last dumps of the old kind, where you can go and nose about for perfectly useful items and catch up with local news and gossip. One day, he sent us back to Suttons with a tin coffee pot (minus percolator) for Jeb and Betsy, who were working on the house next door, and a yellow plastic shoehorn for Jude. Another day, it was a slightly distressed blue-enamelled affair that looked like an ibrik for making Turkish coffee. A couple days later, he sent a copy of the Charles W. Eliot pamphlet, “John Gilley of Baker Island” out for us with Betsy.

Merrill Stanley