Bill Townsend -- A Lost Mentor and Friend

Book Review

"Trouble Maker -- The Memoirs of Clinton B. ('Bill') Townsend."
2017. Published by estate of Clinton B. Townsend. Canaan, Maine.
ISBN: 978-1-940244-94-5


December 1, 2017 -- Laura Rose Day just dropped off the 537-page hard-cover copy of Bill Townsend's book, "Trouble Maker," published by his family posthumously. Before I forget too much, reflect too much and cry too much, I wanted to jot down these words from reading it.

Bill's book captures what I think was his mantra, "Be passionate but speak dispassionately." Bill says in the foreword, "These memoirs are largely a record of events, not of personal relationships, although there have been plenty of the latter. No one could have led my life without plenty of social interaction. If leaving out much of that makes the material 'stiff' or boring, so be it." Like the liner notes on the first Boston record ('Listen to the record !'), this command should be appended to every sentence of this review ('Read the Book!').

Bill Townsend was born in 1927; he turned 60 in 1987. I first met Bill briefly in 1991 (when he was 64 and I was 26) but only really knew him beginning in 1997, when he turned 70. Bill died in late 2016 at age 89. From age 63 to 89 Bill did more for conservation than most people accomplish in their entire lives. Sixty-five is when most people retire; for Bill it was the start of his fourth quarter century. Bill only stopped doing conservation litigation until a few months before his passing in home hospice at his dirt-cellared farmhouse in Canaan, Maine.* Bill's brain and soul and spirit never gave out; his ticker and cell structure did. Given a few (uninvented) cell transfusions, Bill would right now be filing a procedural motion to get fish passage at the Frankfort, Maine head-of-tide dam fixed.

Despite Bill's perpetual suit and tie, he loved blues and rockabilly music. Johnny Cash's song, "I've Been Everywhere, Man ..." could be Bill's. He travelled from Tierra del Fuego to Labrador to stand in an icy river up to his waist, and put a size 12 Adams over trout, char and salmon. One day in 2006 he called me up, out of the blue, said he hired a guide and a boat just to go striper fishing near Lines Island on the lower Kennebec River. I arrived, the boat and guide was there, and we hit it. The stripers snuffed us (I think we caught 3), but Bill's determination never flagged (as a salmon fisherman, Bill well knew that fishless days are the price paid for each strike).

Bill caught lots of trout and salmon and kept them; he shot lots of duck and deer and ate them. He had dogs, cats, horses and cows and a farm and a law office in Skowhegan, Maine, where he (especially as a District Attorney) had to deal with some of the worst behavior of humans. But he took it all somehow in stride and never lost his perspective on the big picture.

At 72 he volunteered to be part of the 'mussel brigade' in 1999 to move freshwater mussels de-watered by removing the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine. While paid state staffers 'patrolled' in canoes, Bill got into the greasy muck to toss mussels into the river channel from Noble's Gravel Pit. This was 2 years after he had a near fatal heart attack.** Bill led by example; if mussels had to be moved, he was the first out in the goop to chuck the last handful.***

In all of my talks with Bill, often driving to a Maine Council Atlantic Salmon Federation meeting, we never talked 'big picture,' as in, "Bill, what does all of this mean?" Bill was always focussed on getting something done; and what needed to be done to get that thing done and how that could build to something bigger. It is probably a fact that Bill Townsend, as an attorney, firestarter and cheerleader, created more small, non-profit land trusts and conservation groups than any one person in Maine's history.

Like a 100 foot mural by Thomas Hart Benton, Bill's book, "Trouble Maker" is too large to digest in one view, one sitting and certainly in a brief note like this ('Read the Book!'). Each sub-chapter could easily be expanded to a short non-fiction novel in and of itself. Bill knew this while writing at age 88; I assume he hoped others would color in the details which his sketches capture. I was told by LRD that even when Bill was very sick he was adamant about his book not being 'edited.' This is understandable, Bill Townsend was a powerful, expressive and factually-meticulous writer. His style is that of Leopold and Hemingway and many of the best "just the facts, ma'am" writers of that generation.

[To give an idea of Bill's adherence to veracity, his chilling description of prosecuting a case of child rape is told almost solely through the verbatim testimony of the child from the docket record of the Maine Supreme Court.]

So as to reviewing Bill's book, I have to quote Tom Scholz of Boston in 1976 ('Listen to the Record!') and conductor Kent Nagano in 1991 ('The text is the text.'). The good news about Bill's memoir is that it leaves you hungry for a sequel. The bad news is there won't be one -- unless we help write it.

Douglas H. Watts
Dec. 1, 2017

[* I know Bill and Louise Townsend's cellar was dirt-floored because at Bill's 89th birthday party I was down there, shagging a butt, and studying the sulfidic, rusty bedrock which the house was built on back in the early 1800s on Nelson Hill Road in Canaan.]

[** Bill had a near-fatal heart attack in fall 1996 and was in intensive care for a month so. When he got out he had a Van Dyke beard (where the oxygen mask covered his nose, mouth and chin). It looked just like 'Spock's Beard' from Star Trek. I told him it made him look mean and he said, "I like that."]

[*** On August 12, 1999, at the second Edwards Dam drawdown, Bill took a nasty header on a slick rock at Bacons Rips rescuing endangered mussels. He was sore but recovered a day or so later.]