Northern Composure

At the tip of Maine, lawyers are as far from anyplace else as geography allows, yet they practice law as closely as possible to the way everyone else would like to do it.

by Steven Keeva

Aroostook County, Maine, sets the American standard for remoteness. If Maine is a wayward thumb probing the flank of maritime Canada, Aroostook County is its tip. Its huge tip. Larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, the County, as it is known throughout Maine, meets Canada on three sides. Only its southern border keeps it anchored to the United States.

A land of gently rolling hills daubed with blue and pink lupines, vast hardwood forests and huge potato farms, it is also the land that CLE forgot, where lawyers typically have to drive half a day just to take in a program. And then there are those vast distances within its borders. Nothing is very close to anything else, and in a place where 100-plus inches of snow and bone-aching cold are a typical winter's fare, it can be easy to feel forgotten, presumed missing in the great white--or in more temperate months, green--distance. Until last January, no state bar association president had ever been there.

If any had gone they would have found a legal community that is just that--a community of lawyers with a mission: to preserve the human side of law practice and to get along well with each other without sacrificing their clients' interests. They fight hard in the courtroom, but will then share a meal or drive out to a favorite fishing hole together. They are independent-minded but civil. They practice law the old-fashioned way.

"I was born and brought up in rural Maine," says David Whittier, the hearty bar president who made history by touring the County last winter. "I was always told that the County is different. People said that when you cross the border, it's like you're in a different world. And it's true."

* * *

Allen Hunter is standing on a wooded peninsula that juts into a small lake in precisely what most people would call the middle of nowhere. Between puffs on a wood-tipped cigar--smoked solely to keep blackflies from nipping at his flesh--he strings sentences together with the craft of the accomplished trial lawyer he is, building finally to his peroration.

Allen Hunter: There's an unbelievably huge reservoir of common decency out there.

Under squadrons of bright cumulus clouds, Hunter is surrounded by friends, who happen also to be colleagues. What both he and they know is this: At least for now, common sense is safe in Aroostook County, and the County's lawyers have each other, and to some extent this very place, to thank for that.

A fifth of the Aroostook County bar has come together this late June weekend at the Jalbert camp on Round Pond, a blue jewel in a chain of lakes strung together by the Allagash River to form a wilderness waterway. The only way in other than by float plane is by canoe, and the only way to canoe in is to know how to read the river, with its tricky text of narrow channels and shallow boulders.

This used to be an annual event, though it has trailed off some, and the camp is filled with laughter and animated conversation--signs of relief at being together again un-der the relaxing and civilizing influence of nature.

"All kinds of water out there today," says Jim Coyne, recently arrived with Hunter from the town of Caribou.

"Yeah. Not as challenging as usual. I hardly got a chance to show off," says Dave Soucy, who has navigated the Allagash a couple hundred times. He docked his canoe about two hours ago with Bob Bellefleur, a colleague from Madawaska, and has been busy since then organizing equipment and provisions, and inspecting the old log cook shack.

Dave Soucy: Community is key, and lawyers can be people who tear it apart or help build it.

Of the 60 lawyers in active practice in Aroostook County, 10 are here--or will be shortly--along with Coyne, a Bangor lawyer, a prison warden and a provincial judge from New Brunswick, Canada.

Daniel Wathen, the County-born chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, maintains ties to the County, though he hasn't lived there since he was a teenager. He claims that although the entire state of Maine is known for its live-and-let-live attitude, the County is unique. "There just seem to be more characters per square mile in the County than anyplace else," he says.

Lars Olsen: These guys develop basic, grassroots relationships with their clients.

"When's Rudy coming up?" Olsen asks.

"Hard to say," Michaud says, then raises his eyes. "He may just drop out of the sky."

Rudy is Rudolph Pelletier of Madawaska, probably the best-known lawyer in the County. Respected throughout the state for his skill in the courtroom, he is equally admired locally for the unbridled gusto with which he lives his life. Colleagues know him as the Count of Mont Ste.-Anne, the skiing village near Quebec City where he owns a chalet. He may be the one person no one at the camp would be entirely surprised to see float down from above.

* * *

Together, Pelletier, Michaud, Soucy and Bellefleur represent half the lawyers of the St. John Valley, a swath of Acadian culture along the St. John River, across from New Brunswick, at the very top of Maine. Settled in the late 1700s by French refugees from Nova Scotia, the valley remains a Francophone enclave where translators have long been indispensable at legal proceedings.

Each of the principal valley towns--Fort Kent, Madawaska and Van Buren--has a Canadian counterpart across the river, and in many ways residents' ties with those towns are stronger than they are to other parts of the County or to the rest of Maine.

Soucy, who practices in Fort Kent, lives with his wife, a Canadian, across the river in Clair; on a typical day he crosses the border five or six times.

County residents see the valley as a place where a per-son's word is gold, and where people act with both the assurance and the obligations that come from a centuries-long connection to the land and to the families who live on the land.

In a sense, the people of the St. John Valley--where the old values remain strongest--have become the guardians of the County's soul.

* * *

Allen Hunter rubs his chin and looks straight up into the boughs of a majestic white pine tree that stands at the center of the Jalbert camp. A smudge fire is burning nearby, helping to repel the blackflies that have come looking for a late-afternoon meal.

Hunter is trying to estimate the tree's height when he is interrupted by the sudden blare of music from the nearby cook shack.

"It's at least a hundred feet tall," he shouts, then he smiles and says, "It looks like the Frenchmen are starting to act up."

In the kitchen, Soucy, Michaud and Bellefleur are fixing dinner--washing let-tuce, frying ground beef and onions, and chopping bell peppers--to the wild-ly syncopated, accordion-heavy beat of a Quebecois tune coming from a boom-box.

Twenty minutes lat-er, everyone is gathered around a long wooden dining table just off the kitch-en. On one wall, a trout caught in May 1954 stares blankly from its plaque at a nearby shelf stuffed with old scrapbooks.

Although it is still light outside, gas lamps have been lit, and spaghetti, salad and Acadian buckwheat pancakes, called ployes, are on the table.

By now the frolic-some mood of the "Frenchmen" has spread, and loud laughter has all but drowned out conversation. Until Lars Olsen asks for quiet.

"There is one person whose name I think we should mention now because without him we wouldn't be here," Olsen says, with a soft-spoken grace that could hardly be more at odds with the movie cliché of a prison warden. "Of course, that's Rob Page."

For a moment, the soft hiss of the gas lamps is the only sound.

"To Rob," Hunter finally says, holding aloft a glass of red wine. "He started these things, and we surely miss him each time we do this. And to fellowship--that's the touchstone of everything."

"To Rob," comes the response.

Page was one of Hunter's partners until his slow and untimely death from cancer in 1987 at the age of 45. "He galvanized the Aroostook County bar and said we have all this wilderness around us, why don't we use it," Hunter recalls. "It really helped preserve civility in the practice of law."

"My dad got blown up in a mill explosion," Bellefleur adds pensively, "and Rob represented him in the workers' comp case. He still tells me, 'Be as good a lawyer as Rob was, and I'll be very happy.' "

Attention then turns to Bob Mi-chaud, who, his glass raised, looks uncharacteristically serious. "I think we ought to make a toast to the other person without whom we definitely wouldn't be here," he says. "Bob Jalbert."

By all accounts, Jalbert was an extraordinary character. A lawyer in Fort Kent, he was a passionate outdoorsman. It ran in his family. His father, Willard, who was known among lovers of the North Maine woods as "The Old Guide," instilled a deep love for the Allagash wilderness in his children, and when Bob grew up he and the family built three camps along the waterway, this one--the Jalbert camp--being the largest.

The Jalberts were hard men, County lawyers say, but they inspired an admiration that is palpable still. In 1980, Bob Jalbert died in a plane crash on his way to the place he loved best, the Jalbert camp, where his legacy remains very much alive in the hearts of the lawyers gathered around the dinner table.

As conversation at the table resumes its sprightly tempo, topics change with the fluency and ease common among old friends, finally blossoming into a kind of collage, built of snippets on family, community, practice. ...

"I happen to be dumb lucky," says Soucy as he takes a ploye from a stack and lays it on his plate, "because I grew up in a town where lawyers are people whom people look to for solutions. And who in their right mind, given that role, would not want to fulfill it?"

Someone brings up the fact that every lawyer in the County is there because he or she wants to be. Everyone had to leave to go to law school, but they all came back. Mi-chaud began his career in Los Angeles. Bellefleur started out in Texas.

"I was born in Aroostook County, but I grew up outside it," Hunter says. "But there was never a moment in my life that I did not know I would be back here."

Soucy mentions Plato's concept of an ordered community. "He said you cannot have an ordered soul without an ordered family, and you can't have that without an ordered community. It's all part of the same whole: The individual requires family requires community."

Which brings up kids and schools and school boards and the elements--both tangible and eph-emeral--that make the County an ideal place to rear children, not the least of which is the landscape, the moose, the fish, the deer.

Then, as many discussions do, this one touches on workers' compensation law. In the 1970s and '80s, Maine's workers' comp laws made for a thriving practice for many local lawyers. During that period, defendants' insurance companies were required to pay lawyer fees, which could be substantial.

Coyne was workers' compensation commissioner until 1983, when Soucy succeeded him. Coyne recalls holding hearings on the fender of the fire truck in the Fort Kent fire station.

And he and Soucy talk about hearings they held in St.-Georges, Quebec, obviously outside their jurisdiction but practical because so many injured employees were woodsmen who lived in the area, as did their physicians.

But the king of workers' comp practice, and the subject of a great many stories, was Pelletier.

He built a booming practice by representing Canadian woodsmen injured in Maine, people who, before the laws changed, had no hope of getting compensation for what were often grievous injuries. Pelletier still refers to those clients as his "flock."

"Rudy used to do something that was truly amazing," Soucy recalls. "He would come to comp hearings and he would translate [to and from French] for his own clients in his own direct and for the insurance company lawyer in his cross.

"And the thing is, Rudy's integrity was never in question, not by anyone on either side. Lawyers in other parts of the country would probably find it outrageous; they'd think we're a bunch of rubes. But his opponents never questioned it," Soucy says.

"Most of the guys on the other side understood little French, but even when his clients said damaging things, embarrassing things, he always translated it honestly."

* * *

Outside, while what is left of the day's light drains from the sky, the table starts to empty. A loon's crazy call ricochets around the lake. Finally, only Hunter and Soucy remain.

"We learn to do things by doing battle with a worthy opponent who plays fair," says Soucy, who is bespectacled, solidly built and bearded. "When a lawyer here tells you he doesn't have a document, he doesn't have the document. But with lawyers in Southern Maine who say they don't have a document, you can't assume it's true."

Hunter nods. "There's an enormous price the client pays when lawyers focus on their adversary rather than on their clients. I'm talking about a lost art, the art of counseling. I was reminded of just how important this is recently when I had one of the great moments of my career."

He sits back in his chair. "A retired farmer, 86 years old, comes into my office for some advice. Well, I gave him the advice. I spent maybe half an hour with him, and I asked for no money. There was absolutely no suggestion that I should be paid.

"The next day, a bag of po-tatoes arrives." Hunter pauses. "I can't say this without crying." He pauses again, his eyes tearing, then collects himself. "At 86, he went out into the field after the harvest and scavenged for leftover potatoes until he could fill a bag. Then he brought them to my office. When I die, that's something I'll remember."

* * *

Jack Simmons, one of the better-known trial lawyers in Maine, has had occasion to try cases in Aroostook County. He is fascinated by the legal culture there, he says, because its so unlike what he's used to.

"The County is very different from the rest of the world," says Simmons, whose practice is based in the Southern Maine town of Lewiston. "They fight hard against each other, but you wouldn't know it because they get along so well."

As an outsider, Simmons says he has always been treated well in the County, even if he has occasionally been chastised for behaving like--and County lawyers tend to say this with some derision--a "litigator."

"Not long ago I filed a motion in a discovery issue," he recalls. "The opposing lawyer called me, and he said, 'What the hell are you doing? If you have something to tell me, why don't you pick up the phone and call?'

"He was right," Simmons says. "That just isn't the way they do things up there." It was Pelletier who set him straight.

Indeed, flinging paper when words would suffice is considered unprofessional in the County. James P. Archibald, a member of the state supreme court on active-retired status, who at 85 still hears cases in the county seat of Houlton, says things haven't changed much since he started practicing 60 years ago. "I cannot remember writing another lawyer and saying 'This will confirm ...,' " he recalls. "We did it all over the phone, and that was that."

"The County is really like a big small town," says Sarah LeClaire, who recently left Pine Tree Legal Assistance, Maine's legal services agency, to start a solo practice in the County's largest "city," Presque Isle.

Since leaving Pine Tree, where budget constraints often meant that baroque procedural maneuvers were her only available weapon, she says she has come to realize just how decent her colleagues here are.

"Everyone's been nice to me in spite of the stuff I had to pull," LeClaire says. "I don't think I'd be able to forgive someone like me so easily."

* * *

Kevin Cuddy is padding around the Jalbert camp in Birk-enstock sandals, blue sweat pants, a T-shirt and a baseball cap. You wouldn't know he isn't County. In fact, he's one of very few lawyers "from away" whose approach to the practice of law has earned him an honorary position in the County bar.

Cuddy, who has come up frequently from Bangor during the past 20 years, has been on Allagash trips before as well as at annual Super Bowl weekend get-togethers at Pelletier's Canadian chalet.

"There's definitely a sensitivity to civility here, and gatherings like this really promote it," he says. "It's not artificial like city or county bar association meetings. You don't really let your hair down at those like you can here."

Cuddy says he thinks that, on a percentage basis, Aroostook Coun-ty lawyers are more competent than Bangor lawyers. They're more efficient here, too, he says. "It's satisfying to watch lawyers from Southern Maine come up wondering whether these people even speak English and leave without everything they had when they came," he says.

Pelletier, a frequent courtroom adversary of Cuddy's, arrived earlier on the second day at the camp, coming not by air but by canoe like everyone else. At 65, he's in extraordinarily good shape. Tall and ram-rod straight, he'd be a dream poster boy for Modern Maturity.

"How's Bob doing?" he asks Soucy upon first seeing him. He is referring to Soucy's partner, Bob Plourde. "I worry about him," Pelletier adds. "He doesn't spend enough time away from his practice."

Pelletier himself has made an art of taking time away, whether on the tennis court after work or skiing, which he does every weekend there is snow at Mont Ste.-Anne. He says he wouldn't dream of staying home, even to prepare for a big trial.

"Skiing does much more for my anxiety and stress than working," he says. "You literally wring the tension out of your body by being physically active, and that does so much for your work."

* * *

Today, the only thing remotely legal that anyone seems concerned about is the 1996-'97 Open Water Fishing Regulations. Hunter has brought his homemade fly rod along, and with a few other eager anglers he has selected the day's flies from among dozens in his case. It turns out to be a rotten fishing day, though, and the only catch is a tiny brookie, about a quarter-inch on the right side of the law.

Later, after dinner, the entire group settles onto the benches surrounding the fire pit, where the smells of bug spray, pines and burning wood commingle. There, the jokes begin. Jacques des Jardins, a provincial judge in the St. John River town of Grand Falls, New Brunswick, shows a particular apt-itude for sharing bawdy stories, and every time silence threatens to break out, he trots out a new one.

Soucy, too, has come armed with a raft of jokes--he's especially good at telling "downeaster" jokes, featuring characters from a part of Maine known for dry humor and folksy accents. But after the jokes have all been told, Soucy has something else to say by way of acknowledging that, with tomorrow's departure, something special will end.

"If I were to pick a theme it would be community," he says, star-ing into the fire. He glances up at the others. "Although Aroostook County is as vast as it is, it is a community. People know each other, they care about each other, and, most importantly, they are accountable to each other.

"We share the joys and the pains of life," he says. "And that's not a bad thing."

After a moment, he adds this: "I used to think that if you're an educated man, you can be at home anywhere on earth. Well, I've come to realize that I feel most at home in the place where I recognize the mountaintops and where I know and love the people.

"One thing we have here is a sense of our place in the world. We would never say this is the finest place in the world to live, but it is our place, and it is the best place for us."