Tall Tales Shelter: The Story of Goose Eye Mountain

The stove flame cast flickering shadows around the lean-to as my pot of Knorr Spanish rice simmered. We had arrived late to the Tall Tales Shelter, just before the Maine-Vermont border (or just after it, depending), and the sun quickly disappeared behind the mountains to the east, leaving us sunk in arboreal gloom. But despite the lateness of the hour we had found the shelter empty… or so we thought. 

“What was the deal with Goose Eye Mountain?” I asked as I squeezed the mud out of my jacket. “Three summits? It seems excessive.”

“Right?” said Mica, stirring his bowl of instant mashed potatoes and oatmeal. “And just before the main summit, were those… vertical bog boards? With ladder rungs nailed across them? How can a sheer cliff also be a mud bog?”

Suddenly a gravelly voice emerged from what I had taken to be a discarded heap of wool blankets in a dark corner of the lean-to. ”Ah, ye be wantin’ to know the story of Goose Eye Mountain, be ye?” 

Mica and I both screamed politely, and the heap of blankets straightened itself up into the shape of a slightly more upright heap of blankets. We heard the snikt of a lighter and its flame revealed a general suggestion of whiskeryness and flannel before going out. A red coal glowed brightly and then dimmed, and the smell of weed smoke drifted across the shelter. 

“I, uh. I guess we be. I mean, be we. That is… yeah?” I said eloquently. 

“Aye…” said the voice, and coughed for quite a while. When the coughing ended, it was quiet again. The stove hissed. The quiet stretched out as long as narrative tension demanded, then just a tiny bit longer, until I started to say ”So—” and then the voice came again, louder than before, as if it had been waiting for one of us to say something so that it could interrupt us.

”WELL,” said the voice, “I suppose ye know that Paul Bunyan retired to Maine?” 

“Of course,” I said with barely disguised contempt. “Everyone knows that.”

”Well, Mr. Smarty Britches, and did ye also know that he retired right here to this very area, just before the Maine-Vermont border (or just after it, depending)?”

”I—“

”Exactly,” the voice cut me off. “Well what most folks don’t know is that when he retired, Paul Bunyan wanted to find himself a place to relax and look at the clouds a bit and smoke his pipe, where everyone would stop pestering him to re-route this river or chop down that giant tree. And he reckoned Goose Eye Mountain, surrounded as it is by nearly a million acres of impenetrable mud bog, was the perfect spot.

”Well Goose Eye Mountain was much taller in them days, in fact it was famous for being the tallest mountain in all of Maine, all New England in fact. They used to call Mount Washington ‘The Goose Eye Mountain of the Whites.’ But no one had ever climbed it, due the mud bog problem. In fact no one had ever properly seen it, they simply deduced it must be there, from the gravitational effects measured upon other mountains.”

“How did they—“ I began.

”Magnets,” snapped the voice. “Now hush your fool mouth while I tell you this tale proper-like, without all these gol’darn framing narrative quotation marks.”

I turned off my stove and began to eat my Spanish rice, stifling the usual wails of pain as the boiling hot rice gradually burned all of the skin off the inside of my mouth, and the voice continued its tale without further interruptions or quotation marks.

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