Unlikely though it may seem, Vinalhaven, an island no less, is home to a band of car thieves who strike with impunity. Impunity is that characteristic which, in the face of what passes for police protection but is in fact only the Knox County Sheriff, so typifies both our mischief-makers (like ATV riders) and our more serious offenders (like drunk drivers, tire slashers and wife beaters) of all sorts. The thieves are like blackflies, in that they’ve never been seen. Accordingly they are known as the No-see-ums.
None of the No-see-ums has ever been caught, which is not surprising; hardly anyone ever gets caught. There are exceptions, though. Last week, for example, Puffer Hutchins lay down in the middle of Main Street, as is his custom, just around dusk. Most of us, accustomed to him and knowing that it wasn’t so cold he’d freeze, just left him there and drove around him. Around 6 p.m., however, the substantial drinking public became aware of a Budweiser pricing war and traffic picked up. The lady who operates the Stop/Slow traffic sign around the municipal sewer excavation project took up a position next to Puffer’s prone body and directed alternating pick-up trucks, eastbound (toward Boongies), then westbound (toward Fisherman’s Friend), protecting Puffer during the hour or so it took frantic drivers to discover that, for the moment at least, there was no significant savings at either place and that it couldn’t be determined whose beer was coldest. After the traffic coordinator left, however, (not before thoughtfully erecting a protective perimeter of orange cones around Puffer), the Deputy, his attention diverted by some aggressive looking skate boarders on the sidewalk, and being unfamiliar with Puffer’s habits, ran him over with the cruiser, subsequently serving him with a summons for obstructing traffic.
I’ve digressed though, not hard to do with a topic as broad as hell raisers or as fertile as law enforcement, but I want to get back to the No-see-ums. Another of their distinguishing characteristics, perhaps the most striking, is their longevity and advanced years, which must be considerable because my first memory of them is back in the 1950s and if they were old enough to have stolen a car then they must, unless they’ve been taking on apprentices, be in their 80s by now.
In 1959, I think it was, when I was a sophomore in high school, ‘Rubber’ Bickford’s 56 T Bird was found high and dry on top of that pile of rocks that looms up straight ahead just as a driver is expected to negotiate a sharp left turn, west bound, at the bottom of the hill just beyond the dump. It being a dirt road, the maximum speed at which such a maneuver can be successfully accomplished, many of us have, over the years, discovered, is about 30 and that’s pushin’ it. If one is at the helm of a VW bus (I speak with authority as a result of having known such a person well), 30 is too fast and so is 25. It can be done at 22 if the driver’s window is down, if more of the driver is outside than inside and if at least three additional aft occupants are hard to port. We had our own cop back then. ‘Bonnie’ Charles Fabian was from England; he’d come back here in pursuit of an island girl he’d met while she was over there on an exchange program. He talked funny and he drove funny; that is to say on the wrong side of the road and as such the little spinning blue light he had plugged into the lighter in his Corvair and held out the window with his left hand because its magnetic bottom had rusted away, was kind of superfluous. Folks just naturally got out of his way. When Bonnie arrived at his house shortly after the incident, just after midnight, ‘Rubber’ answered the door doing a passable impression of having just been roused from slumber and although he was hard pressed to explain convincingly just how much tossing and turning he must have done in his sleep to have produced a broken arm, a gash over his eye requiring 20 stitches, and so much blood that his feet were making squishing noises in his socks, he could not be dissuaded from his assertion that someone had stolen his car. More to the point, he even dashed off, squishing, to the driveway in his underwear to see for himself and to convincingly register his surprise and anger. The No-see-ums had struck, and again with impunity.
The gang’s most daring caper though was in the 1960s when they kidnapped Scruffy Wooster. Scruff had been to the Legion Beano and after having made several round trips outside, in the course of the evening, to refresh himself from a bottle of coffee brandy and a quart of milk in his pick- up, the card he claimed was a winner was revealed to be kind of a dogleg rather than a straight across, straight down or diagonal and, denied his winnings, he stormed out in something of a huff. On his way home, as was subsequently related by Scruff, the gang, their faces covered with kerchiefs, emerged from the bushes up by Lawsons Quarry when Scruff slowed down to relieve himself, overpowered him, threw him in the back with an escort, slowed to a crawl before dumping him outside his own house up on the North Haven Road and then sped off with his truck. Scruff called the cops himself. When the cruiser arrived Scruff insisted on accompanying them as they commenced their search for the truck. Heading back down the North Haven Road, Scruff casually suggested, as they were abreast of Rabbit Lodge, that they might be going too fast to conduct a thorough visual search and there, coincidentally, rolled over and quite a ways down in the bushes off the north side of the road, was Scruff’s truck, abandoned, as was so often the case before and has so often been the case since, by the No-see-ums who had again made their escape without leaving a clue.
When I was a senior in high school someone, just before daylight, stole my father’s pick-up and, presumably on their circuitous way to the ferry to catch the morning boat to fence it on the mainland, wrapped it around a tree up by the lumber yard. Officer Bonnie, having been alerted by the fire department, came to my house about dawn. My father, for reasons that remain a mystery to me, saw fit to come to my room immediately and his concerns, when he saw the extent of my injuries, which I explained I’d incurred the previous evening when I fell from a pile of rocks on Armbrust Hill playing cowboys and Indians in the dark, were unseemingly focused on the damage to his truck instead of on my own condition, to which he remained unsympathetic even as I clung to my assertion that the car thieves had struck again, an argument I found difficult to dignify when he testified convincingly against me.
– Phil Crossman
Vinalhaven