Otherworldly Maine

by Noreen Doyle

  The Magician was the nickname of a guy whose real name was For-rest Woodroe, an otherwise lackluster accounting major save for one curious fact: he came from a part of Maine that, at the time we’re talking about, still had a vibrant folk tradition of magic. It was somewhere up near Solon or Carrabassett maybe. The joke around campus was that while other kids were growing up playing with dolls or chemistry sets, the Magician was concocting potions and working out incantations. The bookshelves in his dorm room were lined with volumes by Albert the Great, Cornelius Agrippa, and Giordano Bruno. Forrest regularly wrote cryptic letters to the college newspaper interpreting current events in light of the prophecies of Nostradamus, signing his bizarre messages with the penname Nick Cusa. Guys like this show up every fall on college campuses all across America. What separated Forrest Woodroe, what kept him from being just another freshman goofball, was the fact that people actually witnessed him alter the course of the 1975 World Series. It happened the year before I got there, but here’s what they say about it.

  Going into the sixth game of the series, the Red Sox are down three games to two against the Reds, playing at home in Fenway. Everybody in New England is barnacled to their TV screen. The game goes into extra innings. Now it’s past midnight. Bottom of the twelfth and leading off for the Sox is Carlton Fisk. On Pat Darcy’s second pitch—a low inside sinker—Fisk takes a mighty swipe. The ball goes soaring up in a meteoric arc toward the wall in left field. It’s a crisis, a moment when the past has least hold on the present and the present has greatest hold on the future. The ball becomes a lifeboat with all of New England’s hopes crammed into it, and it’s drifting dangerously toward the foul line.

  Fisk takes a tentative step down the line toward first; stops; watches. Time stops and watches, too. That’s when the guys watching the game in the dorm lounge notice Forrest is standing performing this strange rhythmic motion with his arms, waving to the right as if to urge the lifeboat to keep from running afoul. Each wave is joined with a hop, so he’s waving as he’s bouncing his way across the room. Everybody’s seized with wonder, looking at Forrest, when suddenly a loud “Hey, look!” rings out in the room. Eyes return to the TV screen, where Carlton Fisk is now doing the exact same thing as Forrest—waving his arms as he hops, in just the same fashion, even keeping exactly in sync. Three waves with three hops: whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. It is a very strange moment and it’s going on even still: Forrest Woodroe leading Carlton Fisk in this weird dance across 250 miles and all of eternity.

  But everything changes when the lifeboat hits the yellow foul pole above the wall—“Fair ball!”—and becomes a game-winning home run. The day is saved and Carlton Fisk is a hero! And to those sitting in the lounge of York Hall at the University of Maine on this faraway October night, so is Forrest Woodroe.

  Even though the Red Sox would go on the next day to drop the ball and lose the series to the Reds, that sixth game—capped by Fisk’s unforgettable performance—went down as the greatest in World Series history. And Forrest Woodroe, for his part, stepped into campus history and was known ever after as the Magician.

  As for what went wrong with the Sox in that remaining game, the Magician had a role in that, too. Much to everybody’s dismay, he was unable to make it back from some unspecified business in time for the game. The guys were counting on his working the magic one more time. They were plenty mad when he didn’t show. Somebody even suggested that they burn the Magician at the stake for his failure, but death threats are ordinary in the mouths of disappointed Red Sox fans. Just ask Bob Stanley.

  Cooler heads, though, prevailed that night in Maine, especially once it was reasoned that if this guy can sway the course of a World Series game, there’s no telling what he might do to anybody who tried to mess with him. No one was willing to take that chance. Indeed, there are those who say that the Magician was so indignant about even the mild rudeness he suffered from those Red Sox fans when he finally did show up, that he put a hex on their team so they would never win another World Series. One can only conclude that this, combined with the Babe Ruth curse, adds up to some pretty potent hoodoo.

  And so the Magician now enters this story about Leo LaHapp and the statue of Virginia Dare. I myself have no part in the rest of it, save for the gathering of details after the fact. I have to admit that I did play a small role in hatching the scheme that called for the Magician’s services, and it was me who came up with the idea to carve Croatoan into the Hollow Tree, thinking it might work as a kind of navigation beacon for Virginia Dare—but I didn’t think anybody would take it seriously. Come on, this was a bull session.

  When those guys from the dorm lounge—including, among others, Crilly Fritz, Peter Snell, and a muscle-bound guy that everybody called Animal—went off looking for the Magician, I stayed behind and so did Westphal. For a little while we sat around trying to impress the women by making fun of how gullible those nitwits were. But then I got tired and went off to bed, leaving Westphal still trying to impress the women.

  What went down next at the Hollow Tree came to light just this past Christmas—Westphal filled me in. Turns out the Magician was perfectly willing to help those guys help Leo get his girl. Carving the word Croatoan into the Hollow Tree was a great idea, the Magician said, but to cast an effective love charm—especially if it involved animating a marble statue—that would require a more formal ritual, for which the presence of all these guys was required. They eagerly agreed to it.

  So it must have been at that point the Magician went to his closet, grabbed the blue denim laundry bag and shook out a bunch of dirty clothes onto the floor. Then he gathered a few items from a drawer, stashed them into the bag in a big clatter, and the whole crew set off for the Hollow Tree.

  The Hollow Tree was a beloved campus landmark, a huge old cottonwood on the long, sloping lawn above the Penobscot River. It was the biggest tree around, and some people even claimed it was the largest in the state of Maine. At the base of its immense trunk was a gaping hole, wide as a church door, that led into an immense, rotted-out interior. Inside was cozy as a chapel, with space vaulting upward into the dim rafters of the world, where statues of angels and Madonnas might lurk unseen in dark niches. There was room enough in there you could celebrate a mass if you wanted, or have a party, or—more intimately—bring a date and make out.

  Most everybody who attended the university in those days sooner or later did. It was a rite of passage and widely held that if you didn’t make out in the Hollow Tree at least once before graduation, you couldn’t really call yourself a University of Maine alum. Over the decades, the aura of all those comings together inside the tree must have inhered into the very xylem and phloem of that venerable monarch; if tree rings were a record of lovers’ trysts rather than years, then this cottonwood easily qualified as the oldest living thing on earth.

  I like to imagine that when the Magician and his band of dorm rats showed up there in the wee hours of the night, a pair of terrified lovebirds were flushed from cover, bolting out from the Hollow Tree as the truth sometimes does in the course of things. There they go, a couple of quail, bobbing as they weave, hopping and tripping as they tug up on jeans, open shirt and open blouse unfurling behind them in a ghostly flutter. They flee across the dark lawn toward still darker reaches in the distance, until their fantastic forms fade into the same stuff from which everything after midnight is made, two blurs in the blur of darkness.

  The Magician and company now stood in front of the Hollow Tree. Preparations were made for the ritual. The Magician emptied out the clattering contents of the blue denim bag: a can of Sterno, a camping pot, a potholder, some matches, and another item, hard to see. The Magician instructed Crilly Fritz to go inside the tree and carve Croatoan somewhere in its heart. With gusto Crilly pulled out his pocketknife and vanished into the cottonwood.

  By the time he emerged from his task, the Magician had things set up on the grass. The can of Sterno was going. The guys stood in a semi- circle around him. Using the p
otholder, the Magician suspended the camping pot over the blue flame. He had begun his conjuring. I guess you could call it that.

  All of the guys now went drop-jawed, looking back and forth between what the Magician was doing and one another, or maybe they were just looking for the exit sign. The Magician’s spell, performed in a tone of voice that seemed to rise directly out of a catacomb, went something like this:

  Most people are discomfitted by poetry in one way or another, and these guys were no exception. But they were thoroughly undone when the Magician started to lower into the camp pot a waxen figure—some say it was in the shape of an angel, others say it was a bear, and there is one report that insists it was just a handful of birthday candles—and proceeded with his incantation:

  By no academic standard can this be called good verse. You won’t find stuff like this in a Norton Anthology. But if a poem is measured by the effect it has in the world, then this one reversed the magnetic pole of reality.

  First thing the guys hear after the Magician finishes is the growling. It erupts from somewhere deep inside the tree, then pounces out like a panther or a really mad Bigfoot. Everybody, including the Magician, goes lime white and starts trembling like an aspen grove. The Magician himself is the first one to break, taking off like a barn-sour rental horse. The rest of them are right on his tail.

  Given what happened over the next few days, it’s no wonder these guys fell into tacit agreement never to mention this episode again. The whole thing is embarrassing. Even today if you manage to track one of them down and ask about that night around the Hollow Tree and how it might have been connected to the Witch Hunt that followed, they will deny any knowledge of the topic. It’s the main reason the story didn’t get out before this.

  Here’s the next part.

  The other famous campus landmark was in front of the gym: a bigger-than-life-size statue of a black bear. The black bear is the University of Maine mascot and this one had been around since the days of Rudy Vallee. I’ve seen a yellowed photo of old Rudy standing next to this bear. The singer is wearing a long raccoon coat and is crooning something through a megaphone, probably the “Maine Stein Song.” So this picture would have to have been taken in the late Twenties. Otherwise pretty ferocious looking, the bear was made out of wood and plaster, so by the time we got to college in the Seventies he had been chewed up by termites and was looking pretty mangy.

  On the very next morning after the high jinks around the Hollow Tree, Peter Snell was heading to the gym when he was shocked to discover the bear was gone! There was the empty pedestal, and all around it he could see footprints and deep ruts leading off in the direction of the woods. Peter Snell had flunked basic math a couple of times, but this two-and-two he could put together. He ran back to the dorm, terror stricken, with the whole pack of junkyard dogs that was his imagination nipping at his heels.

  He found the rest of the Magician’s assistants from the night before and warned them of the big trouble afoot. Whatever level-headedness had remained among them had now been dropped into a vat of acid. Greg Downing, another dorm resident, happened to be walking past the room where they were in heated deliberation. What he overheard didn’t make much sense, so he thought it was just another bunch of Saturday morning drunks. He wasn’t able to say who said what, but among the fragments of conversation preserved in his report are these:

  “Shit! Do you really think that bear’s name was Croatoan?”

  “Shit! Is that what we heard growling in the tree?”

  “Shit, we gotta get that bear back—the football team’s gonna kill us!”

  And lastly: “That Magician is a dead man!”

  Then the guys charged out of the room—no need to repeat their names, you know them by now—and went off, presumably to grab the Magician and force him to set matters aright. One of the things we learned in political science class was that the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy; the same might be said, at least in this case, when it comes to folly.

  Now, believing that a ratty old statue of a bear, some dilapidated university mascot, could be conjured—even by mistake—into life, and that its name would just happen to be Croatoan, is by no means as far fetched as you may think. Wacky behavior stemming from wayward belief happens all the time in America. It may be the only story we’ve got.

  Compare, for instance, the man from Plymouth, Massachusetts, who, a couple hundred years ago, had an idea about how to bring in a few more tourist dollars to his pretty how town. He went down to the harbor and walked out onto the strand of dreams. Or maybe it was a mudflat. The place was strewn with unremarkable boulders dropped there about ten thousand years ago—a heap of junk a glacier didn’t want anymore. It had been lying there like this for millennia. But he walked around for a while, like people do in Fairly Reliable Bob’s Used Car Lot, and at last selected a boulder, perhaps the least remarkable of them all, into which he chiseled four numerals: “1620.” Next thing you know, the rock exploded into myth.

  Historians assure us that the picture of Pilgrims stepping off the Mayflower onto this rock as if it were a welcome mat to the New World is little more than a charming bit of Thanksgiving lore, but it nevertheless translates into some overly firm belief. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville (that shrewd Frenchman) observed just how obsessed Americans had already become with this coffin-size piece of glacier trash: “I have seen fragments of this rock carefully preserved in several American cities, where they are venerated, and tiny pieces distributed far and wide.” Today Plymouth Rock is housed in a kind of Greek temple, and it draws millions of people a year to an otherwise unexceptional place surrounded by sour cranberry bogs, lonesome pine woods, and smelly salt marshes. Talk about conjuring!

  Well, the guys did find the Magician that day, sometime around sunset, and hauled him back to the Hollow Tree, where they planned to make him cancel the faulty spell cast the night before. But when they got there a lot of angry people were swarming about on campus—the football team had just lost—and the Hollow Tree was in plain sight, so our boys beat a hasty detour to the forest behind the university and went down the woods path that the cross-country team trained on.

  At some point they left the trail and pushed into the dark spruce and fir forest where they found hundreds of small cheesecloth bags festooned from nearly every branch of the evergreens. The guys thought this a little strange, but they had bigger and stranger worries: they had to get that bear back before somebody got hurt—namely them—at the hands of a superstitious football team and its angry fans.

  By the time they reached a spot secluded enough to perform whatever crazy ritual deemed proper by the Magician, dusk had settled in.

  “Get going,” Animal said as he gave the Magician a nasty shove. “Get that bear to go back where it belongs.”

  “Look,” the Magician said, “I’m not sure I can. I don’t know any spells that work on bears.”

  “What do you mean? Look what happened last night. Sure as hell looked like it worked to me. Just say the same thing, and make sure you mention the bear’s name again.”

  “What are you talking about? What name?”

  “Croatoan, you idiot!”

  “I don’t have my magic kit,” the Magician said, “I left it at that tree last night. When I went back this morning to get it, all the stuff was gone.”

  “We don’t have time for that crap. This is serious. Look, here’s some candles. We’ll light them and stand around holding them and you just sing that damn bear back to where the hell it belongs. Now do it!”

  Alas the Magician, wanting his bag of tricks, did the only thing any performer can do in such a situation—he winged it. Who knows exactly what words he chanted, but they came through in that same catacomb tone, only now they tumbled along through the dusky forest like empty trash cans in a Halloween wind.

  Little is understood anymore about the relation between word and world. In sounding it out, you might think there is some vast separation between them, start
ing with the letter L and reaching out to every level of meaning. But this would be an error. There is no separation, or so they say. To the artists who work in this medium—which goes by the name of magic—there is a conviction that nothing happens by chance or luck. These people align their actions with some bigger principle, in some cases bright and shining, and in others very dark indeed. All of them use the human voice to express the inner nature of the mind, to draw forth its secret manifestations and to declare the will of the speaker or a guardian angel or whatever demon might have stowed away for the course of any particular human life.

  Maybe, as you say, all of this is just a load of hooey. You wouldn’t be wrong. But if it had been you jogging down the woods path that evening on your way back to the fieldhouse after a strenuous and solitary training run because you showed up late for cross-country practice, and you heard that creepy chanting coming from the dark woods and had seen the candlelight flickering among the somber spruce and fir boughs, then maybe you would have been struck as poor Leo LaHapp was struck that evening: with the firm impression that there was a coven of witches out there in the University Forest and they were conducting some dark ritual, probably a black mass.

  “Holy shit!” you would say, picking up the pace and running the fastest mile you’d ever run in your whole life (and nobody there to see), just so you can get back to campus in time and sound the alarm: “There’s witches out there—I mean it—and they’re doing animal sacrifices and who knows what all! We gotta stop it!”

  Yes, had all this actually happened to you, then a few pages in the underground history of the University of Maine would have been devoted to your exploits. That is, if anybody bothered to write it.

  But this is Leo’s story and here’s what happened to him.

  He emerged from the forest and Paul-Revered it around campus, hustling from dorm to dorm and shouting about witches. At first people just dismissed Leo as a rowdy or a drunk, but then he managed to convince a couple of resident assistants at the dorm to go into the woods with him to investigate.