How the Beans of Egypt, Maine, Sprouted a Militia

by Christopher Ketcham

In early October, the Second Maine Militia opened its meeting with the traditional shooting of the televisions. The 50 or so "members" (there are no rolls and no one pays dues) chatted quietly as the blasts rang out. A small cannon was fired into the woods, parting the trees and shaking the windows of the house nearby.

But no real televisions were harmed. The sets were just cardboard boxes painted with inane smiley faces and decorated with slogans like "Feel good!" "Proud to be USA!" "Safe in the homeland!" The aluminum-foil antennas, however, did collapse miserably from the real gunfire.

The purpose of the annual meeting, the same as it has been since the militia started in 1995, was to bring together the politics of left and right over speeches, food, live music, and, of course, live ammo. The attendees were a wildly diverse group: young activists and anarchists in black, old beat-up Maine woodsmen with beards to their bellies, retired white-haired college professors, Second Amendment zealots, conservatives, libertarians, Marxists. But they all shared the belief that the U.S. government has lost its moral authority, that both political parties had "degenerated," as one attendee put it, "into whores for wealth and arbiters of empire."

"From the beginning, we were the No-Wing Militia," said Michael Chute, 54, who served as range officer for the slaughter of the televisions. "We ain't right wing, we ain't left wing. We're trying to get the folks to see the problem ain't left versus right, it's up versus down." He uses a tool analogy. "A Republican is a standard screw," said Chute. "A Democrat is a Phillips screw. So whichever way you vote you get the screw."

Michael Chute, the host of the event, which took place on the 17 acres of his property in North Parsonsfield, happens to be married to one of the better-known writers of the last 20 years, Carolyn Chute, 62, author of five novels. Her first book, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, sold 350,000 copies and made her a darling of the literary establishment in the 1980s. The critics compared her to Faulkner and Steinbeck, because what she wrote about so well and so convincingly was the back-broken underclass in Maine, the people who work, like Carolyn once did, in shoe factories or scrubbing hospital floors or picking potatoes. Her characters watch helplessly, like Carolyn did, as children die from lack of healthcare. Indeed, Carolyn and Michael Chute lost a baby in 1982 after the local hospital refused to treat the complications from her pregnancy.

The couple live in a drafty unfinished house with no hot water. "I haven't had a hot water heater since 1970," she says. It also has no septic system (they use an outhouse, even in the bitter Maine winters) and has only a wood stove for heat. It goes without saying there is no television, and certainly not a computer. Chute writes her books on jangled old typewriters. Her husband sometimes hunts moose for their protein.

A best-selling author, broke and eating moose? They ran short on money years ago when Michael, due to illness, had to quit his job as the caretaker of the local cemetery. Carolyn had shared the cash from her book sales and big advances to help her daughter, mother, and several friends. After the books no longer sold, what they had left, mostly, were the family and the friends.

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November 10, 2009

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