On this particular morning I found myself sitting in a quaint little country café eating an odd little breakfast of stuffed zucchini bread French toast. Sitting across from me was a woman I have known for a long time, one of the few brilliant minds I found while living up in the boonies of Maine all those years ago. There she was, a petite woman in her thirties, smiling, bright, active. She was chatting to everyone who passed by, all of their faces and names she knew, and by looking at her you’d never think anything other than she’s just an unassuming single woman having breakfast with a friend.
It’d been years since we caught up. I knew her in her vibrant and wild youth when she was just as untamed as this crazy backwater place. The story she suddenly made a casual mention of illustrated this perfectly. More than a decade previous she was living in a little house with her boyfriend. Out the front door you could see a large open field and just beyond that, within sight, was the neighbor’s trailer. We were talking about this when in an off-the-cuff sort of moment she mentioned that she’d beaten up one of those neighbors with a baseball bat. OK, I hadn’t heard that story before, so I smiled softly and said with utmost honesty, “He probably deserved it.” “Oh hell yes he did!” but that was all she was going to say until the topic came around again. I waited in curiosity and anticipation.
So what did happen? Well… the neighbor in question was a complete asshole, had been since birth. I should know, I knew him my entire life. As a child he ran feral, as an adult he was a merciless drunk and an absolute bastard. He was married then with just three children, the beginning of a growing brood. His wife was young, didn’t know any better, and probably grew up in similarly dysfunctional circumstances.
One day my friend heard screaming coming from the neighbor’s yard. She looked out to see the neighbor bashing his wife’s head repeatedly over the hood of the car. “Oh no he isn’t!” She grabbed the closest thing to her, her home’s security system, a baseball bat sitting aside the door, and ran outside, hopped into the truck, as her boyfriend followed and lept into the driver’s seat. In two seconds flat they barreled through that field and she flung herself out the door, baseball bat in hand. In another split second she took one good swing and hit the back of his knees with an audible crack! He went down like a sack of potatoes. His wife turned her anger towards her rescuers, as many abused women often do. “I’m going to call the cops on you! You just hit my husband with a baseball bat!”
“Go! Call the cops or I’ll whack him again!!”
And in that second she both became my every day hero and a vibrant reminder why I moved the fuck out of Maine. On one hand the lawlessness and “mind your own business” attitude that prevails around there is wonderfully liberating. Also the idea of community is much stronger – the whole idea that if you’re being a dick a neighbor can take you out with a baseball bat without legal consequence is also… satisfying. Unfortunately it’s also an intellectual wasteland and very hostile to outsiders, anyone who is different in any way, and women. There’s so many disappearances and unsolved murders up there that the police have an active 100% cold case force that is begging the public for their help. I find that far more disturbing than city living. If you’re shot in the streets of a city it’s probably a case of wrong time, wrong place, you get shot and brutalized in the woods of Maine it’s personal.
And with that I took another bite of my French toast, she another sip of coffee, and we continued the conversation as if this whole tale was nothing out of the ordinary.
