Nonfiction circa 2006, updated very slightly in 2008. Never published, probably never will be.
If you dial 695-3993, the person who answers the phone will say “Kokadjo.” This is not his name or a greeting in a foreign language. It is the name of the town in which the phone rang, and it is the only phone in town, if Kokadjo can be considered a town at all.
The last time I called Kokadjo it was early spring and the Roach River was swollen with melted snow and April rains. Ed Henderson answered the phone, which sits on a desk in the Kokadjo Camps and Trading Post, where he works. The Trading Post’s motto is “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it,” and this is especially true in Kokadjo, where there are no other stores or restaurants or businesses of any kind. “How’s everything up there?” I asked Ed.
“Pretty good,” he said.
“Anything new?”
“Well, we got another guy living here now,” said Ed. “That makes six of us.”
It would be hard to say that anything much happens in Kokadjo in the off-season; in the winter, snowmobile enthusiasts descend on the camps by the thousands, and hunting parties come in the fall, but April means mud, and a lot of silence in the woods where six people have chosen to make their homes.
Kokadjo sits on the shore of First Roach Pond, about twenty miles north of Greenville, which has a whopping population of 1,500 and is considered “the big town.” There are seven Roach ponds, all of which drain off the Roach River and are well-stocked with salmon, trout, and togue. Nobody seems to know why the ponds are named for an insect that prefers an average temperature of 84 degrees, or, failing that, a Manhattan kitchen. Ed Henderson says that a long time ago one of the Roach Ponds was called Kokadjo Lake, but somebody must have changed it. He’s never bothered to find out why.
Aside from the Trading Post and the pond, one road, and the houses of the six full-time residents, there are no other landmarks in Kokadjo. People who live in cities talk about “getting away from it all,” but if they really wanted to get away from it all, they would not go to Cape Cod or the Hamptons or the Jersey Shore. They would go to Kokadjo, where the all from which they’re fleeing would vanish completely in the rearview mirror, and they would have to make their own coffee every day with a coffee maker purchased from a catalog.
Ed says I shouldn’t make it seem like there’s nothing in Kokadjo. People always get that wrong. “We have moose!” he declares. “And that’s the best part about living here!”
“You mean for eating?” I ask. Moose is an acquired taste.
“For everything,” Ed says.
The residents of Kokadjo, one third of whom own the Trading Post, have taken to promoting themselves, online and elsewhere, as Maine’s “Sportsmen’s Paradise,” because of the fine hunting and fishing to be found there. “Everybody claims they have the best hunting in Maine,” says the Kokadjo Camps website, rather curtly. “Let’s look at the record. No area in Maine consistently produces bigger deer then here, period.”
A snowmobile club has recently formed, called the Roach Riders, and is open to anyone in town. Those interested in attending the spring meeting on May 7 are instructed to call the Kokadjo telephone and ask for Marie, but not too early or too late, as she “is getting reacquainted with Frank, and you don’t want to interrupt that.”
I am anxious to know what happened between Frank and Marie (there had been no mention of any problem when I called Kokadjo a year ago), but Ed is not the type to gossip. Instead I ask him why he came to Kokadjo in the first place. “To get away,” he said.
“From what?”
“From people,” he says, and it occurs to me then that the people who say they want to get away usually mean they want an escape from things – from desks and offices and traffic jams and fast-food wrappers littering the ground. But the real root of the problem, the cause of these things, is always other people. People build desks and put them in offices and put other people behind the desks, and all the people going to work make traffic jams during which some people throw cellophane on the highway. We cause each other headaches, not from malice or masochism, but because it is an inevitable side effect of collective living, of rubbing up against each other all the time and trying to make our way forward en masse. Who wouldn’t want to break free?
On the other hand, a community of six means no new faces, no chance encounters, no missed connections, no sudden acquaintance with a friend of a friend at a bar. Even Thoreau had chairs for company in his cabin at Walden, three of them, in fact, enough to seat half the town of Kokadjo. I am glad Kokadjo exists and I feel compelled to call once or twice a year to make sure it is still there and its residents are still content, but as much as I love the splendor of the Maine woods and the calm left by an absence of human life, I think - wouldn’t it be lonely?
“Doesn’t it get lonely?” I ask Ed.
“No,” he says, sounding surprised. “Today, for example. Today’s been a real good day.” “Why’s that?” I ask.
“Today I haven’t seen anyone,” he says, “nobody at all.”