| |||
Summertime in the BelgradesContentsfor Printing
Article Summaries |
Writer Don Watson: Vignettes of Hallowell
The View from Powderhouse Hill, by Hallowell author Don Watson, looks down on a "community at peace with itself." Watson sits by the blind, old cement-sealed cannon along with his fictitious White Dog and other assorted protagonists and tries to "feel the pulse." For those even slightly familiar with Maine and more specifically Hallowell, he succeeds. There are a lot of view angles from where Watson sits, and he takes in a large panorama of them — combining glimpses of the actual seeable and the internal pulse into delightful, humorous (often very dry) observations. He lives the view, too, by rambling the region with his fictitious cohorts and their enticingly real old-time names: Ormand Plaisted, Freemont Parker, Duane Skidgell, Milo Brann, Baldy LaChance, and the boys at Boynton's — but most of all Albert Sproul. "There's more history to this town than this old cannon," Sproul states, and so they and the White Dog set out to glimpse it through Watson's mastery of acute observation and way with words, and accurate reading of people. "I wondered why it is that those people in these little towns, who cherish their past so much, allow it to slip away," Watson speculates in a visit to the soon-to-be-demolished granite sheds. Don't we all? But thanks to him the past is halted and held firmly in his delightful descriptions and Sproul's laconic language. If the tales are too subtle (which is a special gift of the author), the solution is too simple. Just go to Hallowell: walk the walks, shop the shops, eavesdrop on the so-called locals, and "feel the pulse." "Things go," Watson acknowledges. "Old lovers are lost and neighborhoods change and little towns lose their virginity to the franchise man." Hallowell, to a large extent, has not, at least not in the View From Powderhouse Hill. The book is available for $14.95 at Acme Antiques, 165 Water St., Hallowell, Read "Albert and the Poets," a short story from this book. | ||