About Willipaq

Our mother was called to claim her husband's bodiless head. She picked out a handsome stone of speckled gray Vermont granite for the resting place of what was left of her late husband. “Lost in Willipaq,” read the stone. Willipaq was the name of the small Maine town where David, our father, died. There was a mix up and our father’s body had been cremated by mistake. They still had the head however, neatly tagged and in a box.

—Klein, the Clone from Lost in Willipaq

Willipaq is remote even to a born Mainer. The bumper sticker: “I live in the Other State of Maine,” beckons from rusting pickups that litter the ditches of Willipaq—roadside memorabilia of a lost war with time. Libby Pease is my favorite person out of all of Willipaq County—an evocation of the usually broke and always hopeful denizens of, perhaps, just perhaps, Washington County, Maine—living free and wild in their very own Yoknapatawpha. Ah, but Libby's interlocutors, even as Doctor Who’s companions, had to start somewhere. William Powell was the first choice in The Ninepatch Variation. The Libby tales became a triptych and she picked up a spiritual counselor, a 400-year-old medicine man [in the Red Sneaker Zones]: “Go for it, Lib. Get naked, paint the cat; you’ve earned it,” says Sun-ripples-quiet-pool-to-call-of-loon.

The first settlers named the county Willipaq for its indigenes, a leisurely crowd who seemed possessed of no sense of urgency. The native people strolled the beaches at low tide collecting mussels, trapped the occasional fish in their weir corrals, picked berries, made love and squatted to their need beholden to no clock. Although the Indians—the easternmost band of the Algonquian nation—and the English had no common language, example proved too powerful to resist and soon floggings were administered to pilgrims caught wading out of the shallow pool of purpose. Berry picking and lollygagging on the beach drew an application of the knout. The settlers sported the starched underwear and stiff black broadcloth of the followers of John Calvin.

That these children of nature were a lost tribe of Israel was a popular fancy of Calvinist lore. The Willipaqs’ aimless pursuit of pleasure inspired backsliding among the settlers—protestant vigor was not proof to mixed bathing and sweaty labors under a strange sun. Shapely ankles were exposed while bending over berries and many a maiden found it pleasant to hold her pose. Fornication brought a hundred strokes with the rope’s end; discipline was maintained against deteriorating standards of social comportment. It was the good fight, but futile. Many were the righteous arms grown weary with flogging and surreptitious self-manipulation. Strange diseases thinned the Europeans’ numbers; crops failed. They ate gruel made from acorns and the few sacks of seed remaining, and died.