New writing for your enjoyment..
Two stroke sheep
They say the mother of invention is the best way.
One sweaty summer morning I managed a pick up of an unusually loud mouthed colored ewe and daughter, from a farm close by. The good critter buy came about when my truck was on the blink, to explain the crazy ride. We all have better things to do, so I never bothered to remove the back seat or line my SAAB floor boards with hay. As it turned out, just the little marbles were waiting for my vacuum and no urine stank up the seat. The farmer kept them overnight without water when I said I’d come by automobile. Happy for that small favor. I’ll say. It was my vintage 69 SAAB Model 96.
At other times, with longer trips in this car, I have fully lined the rear seat metal between the front and rear with hay or straw so the average sized sheep could stand to examine this northern Maine world. Removing the back seat and loading animals is not a thing to do these days with so few two strokes or V-4 Saabs still on the road but many of us have done the same thing in years past with other clunkers and Volvos. Why the Swedes’ cars were chosen for this may have to do with the type of people who buy sheep and goats I guess. I no longer haul sheep that way but I have seen 4 sheep in a beat-up estate wagon, a Model 95 SAAB - to be exact - in downtown Bangor. Maybe every sheep deserves at least one ride in an old SAAB or Volvo for good luck. Perhaps on many aspiring farms in Maine and the Maritimes such a ride is destined for the ewe’s own productive life, so call it the mother of invention. That agrarian wagon was quite a sight at a traffic light in the city years back, headed into Hampden or riverside Winterport! Windows cracked. Bleet. Bleet
A GMC efficiently moves these critters now and by the way, sheep have kept me involved in restoring my SAAB and in keeping GMC trucks on the road from sheep incomes. And yet, you can’t beat old clunkers for economical movement of a couple new lambs purchased off farm. Many sheep arrived that way with a grain bag tied around the lower half of their bodies inside a cardboard box on the front right seat floor! Even with the pickup, a winter day is sometimes really too much to make ‘em ride out back in the cold. Perhaps it is not unique to Maine but amid all the duplicate red barns and boringly same farmsteads in Vermont, the same sort of penny pinching lamb rustling has free wheeled up and down those hills over that way and in New Hampshire, in the same fashion, just like here and in New Brunswick.
Funny thing about those two sheep however is how much they deflected the myth that sheep are completely stupid. Never was there an empty crib, a lamb caught in the fence, a sheep outside the fence or even an expired critter left outside for long for the blats of those two stroke huffers and puffers who equally shooed me into gear when I didn’t have a clue. They taught me more about taking care of sheep than any man or beast since then and while I did not mourn the passing of the black bitch, her daughter - Miss Piggy - lived 11 years and gave me 17 lambs which were distributed to other breeders or eaten for Sunday meals by local consumers. She has a grave site next to Brandy, my late father’s beloved mutt farm dog. A dog well known for his love for taking care of raccoons in dad’s truck garden season after season. A burial site of honor for both. |
to help those people who remember certain stories and pictures get copies of the same through contact with me and soon, from a website called SmallTownPapers. Participation in that site is not yet established at this writing but the hope is that all issues published twenty something years ago and now brittle in cold storage will be available to download directly. This site is here primarily to gain contact directly with me in order that readers may request electronic copies of such stories. There are hundreds of mentions of Merrymeeting Bay town family names within my records and while this site is limited in what can be scanned and a fixed storage size of what I put up herein, there will be a better alternative in future. The Standard, will be available as it becomes digitally scanned and is then provided through online access. Through the national SmallTownPapers website, my newspaper archives can be searched by keyword or phrase and viewed as originally printed. For the most part, until then I will freely give what I have back to those interested in the same but when special requests are asked, there may be some small fee attached to time spent in searching files and filling orders. An order blank will come to this site when response demands. Because I published two newspapers in my early career, a second site for that newspaper is also now established. You may contact me at the following address: Wallace Sinclair, PO Box 632 Brownville, ME 04414 Tel. 207 965-8432 or at 