It's Time to Go to Rideout's!

East Grand Lake, Maine

Last month, when I realized the whole family would be fully vaccinated against Covid by the third weekend in May, I thought, for some reason I didn’t quite understand then, It’s time to go to Rideout’s!  I imagined a celebratory pause, a time to acknowledge our good fortune to have survived the pandemic.  I imagined, too, that it would be a safe place to emerge, maskless, into public life. And furthermore, both grandchildren can stand for hours on a dock or riverbank, casting, rolling in their line: silent, mesmerized, as if in prayer. 

It took years for me to finally get to Rideout’s, to sit in this pine camp chair on the screened in porch of this small log cabin overlooking Maine’s East Grand Lake.  The lake spans two counties, Aroostook County and Washington County, far to the north and east in Maine. It is bisected through its long middle by the eastern most border between Canada and the United States.  I can’t help but wonder if my father once stayed in this cabin on one of the many trips he faithfully took to this fishing camp every Mother’s Day weekend.  For over fifty years, he packed his car with fishing poles and lures and the locked black case he called “the office,” which held his Four Roses bourbon and glass cocktail shaker and made the ten-hour trip from Long Island to this very spot.

Rideout’s. The rule I never questioned in my family was that only boys went to Rideout’s.  None of my father’s four daughters were ever invited here, nor was my mother. But the minute my youngest brother was able to hold a fishing pole—he went to Rideout’s.  Sons-in-laws were invited to Rideout’s, and, eventually, grandsons.  It was, I imagined, a place my father went to escape all the females in his life, as if being around his four daughters and my mother for longer than a year would somehow cause him to weaken and fade and he needed to come all the way here for a magical reboot. 

When I was a child, the word Rideout’s came to hold such power in my imagination that when my father said he was “going to Rideout’s,” I imaged a mystical, wild land inhabited by ten foot tall winged moose with soft noses that nuzzled your neck, neon green fish who sang to you. It was a place more spirit than flesh, more dream than reality.  Even its name suggests it’s a place where one can ride out beyond the known. I am a little surprised that we actually found it at the end of a long road out of Danforth.

My father went to Rideout’s on Mother’s Day, he said, because that weekend was when ice-out came to Maine.  At ice-out the fish rose, hungry and eager. How could it be, I wondered then, that ice-out always arrives on that particular weekend? Couldn’t he have stayed home sometime and gone a week later? After my father drove out the driveway, I noticed that it was now my mother whose turn it was to fade. I myself felt forsaken, as if I wasn’t enough of something to keep him here, or enough of something to be invited.  I resented him for leaving it up to me and my four younger siblings to make this day special for my mother. I thought that he should be the one letting her sleep in, making her breakfast in bed, buying her tulips. 

When my husband and I moved to Maine, my father would drop my mother at our house on the way up from Long Island and leave immediately to drive the last three and a half hours north.  But, first, he’d make the requisite stop at LLBean for the latest lure or a thermos with Bean’s logo.  I remember wandering the streets of Freeport one sunny May afternoon looking for my dad. I recognized then that searching for my lost father was a familiar feeling, that there was some remote part of him I’d searched for all my life.  

I am surprised when we drive under the Rideout’s sign that spans the entrance to the camp at how small and unimposing the camp looks. There are fourteen matching log cabins all breathing together on a small lot; a generous number of storage sheds; a lodge, portions of it held up on stilts, the dining room floor aslant and covered in old brown linoleum with a stamped yellow pattern of circles that has been worn down by years of wear.  There’s an old telephone booth outside beside the lodge.  Everything is neat, in place, well maintained.  Serviceable. There’s one long wooden pier that extends out into the lake, straight towards Canada, and beside it, on each side, maybe fifteen aluminum boats are tied up.

The owners, Patti and Stan, are new, having owned the camp for just over a year, so there’s no hope they will remember my father.  I thumb through some old picture albums of guests from long ago, but never find him there.  I meet a woman whose dad sold potatoes to the original owner, sometime in the 60’s.  The owners tell me that many people who come here have a story to tell about coming as a child with a father or grandfather, eating in the dining room which once was set with linen tablecloths and good china; about men who arrived in fancy city clothes who walked straight out onto the dock and stood, transfixed by what was out there.  “There are spirits who live here” Patti said. “Families come back here to remember their lost loved ones whose ashes were scattered over the lake.”

Rideout’s soon casts its spell on our family.  Within hours the grandchildren, fishing rods in hand, feet squarely planted on their square of the dock, fish jumping five yards off, decide this is the most beautiful place in the whole world and they want to come back “forever.”  Finn catches a small-mouthed bass on the first cast!!  “Everyone is so kind here,” Addie observes over dinner the second night.

When I booked our cabins in April, I chose the American plan with three meals a day and cabin-tidying every morning.  We are the only people to choose that option and have the dining room with its solicitous and charming wait staff all to ourselves. On Saturday night Patti makes us a turkey dinner that rivals any I’d made on Thanksgiving’s past.  She prepares it because I told her how my father had regaled us with stories about the turkey dinners’ he’d eaten here every Sunday.  The hosts not only feed us, but coo over the grandchildren and gas up our rented pontoon boat for our morning ride out.  The staff listen to our stories at dinner and tell us theirs. 

“I haven’t felt this well nurtured in years,” I find myself telling Patti not once, but three or four times over the course of our stay. This is a place to come to be cared for, I think to myself.  Then I put it together!  Why my father came on Mother’s Day.  How last century’s pandemic is connected to this moment of our family being here now at Rideout’s for this celebration. Where the lost part of my father lives. 

As some readers already know, my father’s mother died in 1919, in the third wave of this country’s last pandemic, three weeks after he was born.  After her death, he was sent to live with a neglectful foster family for a year. In the way of the times, they kept this entire story secret from my father. It was a terrible grief he knew in every cell of his body, but because it was secret, he was always searching for something, something that explained his grief, something that would quell his longing for the lost mother.

I see now, sitting here on the porch, that my father didn’t want to cook pancakes for my mother on Mother’s Day, instead he wanted a day to be entirely cared for himself.  He wanted a day to remember his own mother, to walk out onto the long dock, cross over the boundary between the living and the dead and find in the embrace of this watery beauty and open sky and green shore, the spirit of his dead mother whose warm embrace was so precipitously taken from him.  Here I am, I think, reunited with the lost part of my father.  Here we all are, a family that this time survived the pandemic without death and with no secrets to keep. 

Rideout’s—a tidy place more spirit than real, though Stan, who spends a good deal of every day repairing something old in this seventy-five years old camp where something always needs a new screw or a new patch, wouldn’t see it that way.  

Rideout’s, a place of repair.  A place to repair.