Douglas H. "Butch" Pye, Jr.

Douglas H. "Butch" Pye, Jr.

How do you say goodbye when you are not there?

My brother Butch is nearing his time to leave his earthly body, and my mother and sister are by his side. They tell me not to worry, not to rush, that I need to remember the time I spent with him in July of this year, "You don't want to remember him like this." This 1000 miles is so far, yet my loved ones are never far. They are in my heart, with every beat of my heart and every breath in my lungs. The love of family transcends time and space and we can close our eyes and feel them close. When I arrive it will most likely be too late to kiss my brother's cheek, to hold his hand, to be there to hug my Mom when he breathes his last breath. This cancer that shortened his life, also gave him a gift to make his peace before leaving. We've struggled with this before, is it best to leave swiftly with a sudden heart failure or accident to spare oneself and their family from the pain of long goodbyes? Or is it better to know ahead of time, to have the opportunity to do your last things on earth, to make peace with the people you care for and love?

There are no answers, and certainly I am no expert. I'm the one that moved away, that made a life in another land and just comes home to visit. Circumstances beyond my control prohibited my move home, and then, it was the comfort level of knowing the people so well in my adopted home. To have two homes, two places with family and friends and familiar places opens your heart even wider, but it also allows you to experience the ache of missing your first home while you live in your second.

What Butch taught me in his life was to truly LIVE. He moved around, he traveled, he got into trouble and got out of it again. He lived a hard life, and he spent the last 20 years more settled than he'd ever been. He made a home in the Belfast area, and loved the islands and the beauty of that area. He still thought of Bath and Phippsburg as home, and certainly like the rest of our family felt that the Alliquippa Harbor was a sort of sanctuary that comes from being a Pye. Lobster-fishing was in our heritage, and although our siblings never did more than do it as amateurs, we all loved the spray of the salt water and the beauty that Small Point exudes.

Butch made his living these past years as a house painter. He even painted Kirstie Alley's house, and she brought him a glass of lemonade. He did some work on the Farnsworth Museum, and was especially proud of knowing certain techniques that rich "summer people" asked for him by name. He was meticulous, and never spilled a drop of paint. It was his craft, and he was truly an artist. He could always sketch well, but never got the accolades our brother Dwight got for his art and his watercolors. Butch was just Butch, and would just humbly shrug his shoulders and laugh.

His life was not always easy, and he inherited the taste for drinking from generations past. That, like is wanderlust to travel, was also tamed in later years. He knew that hard living had cost him relationships, jobs and sometimes his right to drive, and he vowed to not allow it to get out of control ever again. His lungs were weakened by the materials he used in his job, and the cigarette habit he had had since a teen. The last ten years he'd been very careful what he put into his body, and loved to tell you about the herbs he took for his headaches, and the natural remedies he used to keep up his health.

It was to no avail to the strong cancer cells. To have been diagnosed with cancer in mid July and be at the edge of his last hours now in October was hard for him to deal with. He told me in on my visit the end of July that, "if it's the last thing I 'll do, I'll go to the Alliquippa". We were afraid that may not happen, so the kids and I took the camera and took as many photos as we could to let him feel that he was there. It wasn't the same, but it was all we could do.

The family stories of his childhood are legendary to us; how Mom called him "Butchy Boy" when he was little since Douglas was too big a name for a baby- the time he was dressed in a sweet white suit and dribbled chocolate ice cream down his shirt and told a sweet old woman that inquired what is was, "it's shit!". The time Mom took him to school and marched him into his classroom, and by the time she got home he was sitting on the front porch. The time he was getting yelled at by the vice principal at the Bath Junior High School and took a swing with his small wiry self and landed the guy into the trash can. The time he ran off with Pam Hagerthy and got married when he was so young he had to have a paper signed to make it legal. That marriage only lasted 9 months, but I think he never stopped loving her.

The worst story of all was when he and Dwight got into a car with a drunk kid that sped around Webber Avenue and killed a dear couple. The boys were blamed and labeled as killers. Dwight had been thrown from the back seat through the windshield and suffered the first of two traumatic brain injuries- and Butch and the other guy got only a few scratches. That haunted Butch for the rest of his life, and he told me once that if he could change anything in his life it would be that moment that he looked at Dwight and said, "Lets get a ride home, hop in."

Butch's life wasn't perfect, but whose is? He is the blonde blue eyed big brother of my childhood, the one that moved around a lot and I never really got to know until I was older. He knew the constellations, knew each rock, and prayed in the forest. He understood how nature is God, and God is nature. He is in Maine right this moment with pain medication coursing through his veins; he may be in a limbo land where he knows Mom and Pammy are there, and if I am lucky, the tears on my cheeks and the pain in my heart and my fingers on the keyboard are with him now.

Painters paint, musicians make songs and writers write and all I can do when I cannot be there is to write to you. I am going to add the story of the day you, Dwight and Pammy took me clamming so that it will be safe on another site in case another computer loses it.

If you can know what I am saying to you, Butch, I am praying for you to know how much we love you and that you are free to go on to this adventure, this new world of where our souls go when we die. For you, I would imagine Heaven has a rocky harbor and sunshine and salt water and a boat you can call your own. Dad will be there waiting for you, and you can go fishing and laugh about old times. We will continue to share your stories with our kids and their kids and you will be missed. I love you, my brother.


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Published in The Times Record summer of 2008

Going Clammin’

By Jana E. Longfellow

It’s the 4th of July weekend, and I am nostalgic for home. I haven’t missed many Heritage Days celebrations in my hometown of Bath, Maine, but this year we won’t drive home until my youngest niece Maggie marries in August. I’m here in South Carolina for the Fourth, but my heart is in Maine. It seems like everything is making me think of home.

When I was a little girl, I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go clamming…or as a true Mainiac would pronounce it, clammin’. It is back breaking work, and true clammers often walk with a stoop, and have scarred hands from broken clamshells and hamstrings that never really stretch out enough to walk with a long stride. My Uncle Warren, famous in nearby Phippsburg for his antics when drinking Canadian Mist Whiskey, was a good clammer. He knew what flats had the best clams, and never divulged his secrets.

My brothers and sister are all older than me by 13, 12 and 9 years respectively; they never wanted to take me with them. I was the baby, and always in the way. One day after leaving Head Beach with my mother, I begged enough that they brought me with them. I had on a brand new pair of red Keds, and my mother told them that I’d ruin them in the mud if they weren’t rinsed out quickly. They all had hip boots on that would protect their feet, a much more sensible choice of footwear for this activity. My brother Butch promised they’d take care of the Keds, and me, and off I went with my yellow plastic pail.

My siblings and I mirror our parents; my oldest brother Butch and I are blonde like our Mom, and my other brother Dwight and my sister have dark curly hair like our Dad did. Our temperaments, however, are the opposite, with Dwight and I being the quiet ones, and Butch and Pammy the more outspoken ones. With the age difference being so great, the older three had a strong bond that I never really fit into. Being with all of them at the same place at the same time was a rarity, so I suppose that is why I remember this day even more.

The sky in Maine seems to be bluer than anywhere else in the world, but it’s probably just because we appreciate it so much more. When you’ve been cooped inside for so many months of bad weather each winter, the summers are precious and no amount of daylight is wasted. As we walked to the flats that day, the world seemed to have no end and the sky seemed to have no limits. The faster they walked, the more my little legs had to run to keep up. Butch kept a close watch underfoot as he led his siblings, and finally found a good place to drop his clam hod start digging.

I’ve never really thought about how to spell a clam hod, it’s just what we’ve always called it. It’s a basket, actually, with wide slats on each side to rinse out the sand in the water without losing a clam. Some vacationers (we call them “summer people”) buy antique hods and plant flowers in them. My mother does this, too. They have a handle and are easy to carry, and every garage on the coast has a few.

Nowadays, there are not many clammers. The work is hard, and no one likes to work that hard anymore. Local people can get a peck or two without a license, but most people and vacationers need to purchase a clam license.

You choose your spot by looking for little holes peeping up from the mud flats just after the tide goes out. A hole denotes a clam below; the bigger the hole, the bigger the clam. Some people dig by hand, some with gloves. Most people prefer to use a short handled, bent tine rake called a clam hoe. You lean over and dig up a good section of mud and pick through to find your treasure- sometimes more than one. If you are careful, you won’t break the shell; kids usually are not that careful.

The clams have awful big brown heads that stick up and will squirt you. This is the best part of digging, especially for a four year old. Of course, I didn’t eat them. I never have. They looked gross then, and still look gross to me today. My children have been clamming, and love to eat them either steamed or fried; they just love them.

By the time I had a few of the ugly things in my pail, I realized that I had a problem.

My little feet were sinking in the mud, and sinking fast. While my siblings were steady in their hipboots and moving quickly from place to place, I had been planted steady in my little red Keds….which, currently, were buried.

Of course, they didn’t hear me the first, second, or third time I called their names. I doubt they remembered I was there at all! Finally, Dwight turned and realized my plight. My sister Pammy laughed, and said they should just leave me there so she’d get her own room again. The boys thought better, and lifted me up, one on each side of me until both feet were free. Only problem was that I was missing one Ked.

They dug, and dug, and dug, but no sneaker emerged. I thought that there must be some kind of underground clam monster that ate it. “It’s okay, Baby, we’ll tell Mom it wasn’t your fault,” Butch kept repeating.

The scolding I got for losing my new shoe was worth it; my brothers and sister had taken me with them, and I was the happiest little kid in Maine. We got cleaned up, and then went to the parade, carnival and fireworks display over the Kennebec River. I had a sunburn on my shoulders and had the faint smell of saltwater in my hair. July in Maine, ever in my memories and always in my heart.