The facts are these. On April 13, 2009, a man in the late stages of dementia wandered away from his home in Auburn, Maine. Police searched the most likely locations for the 77-year-old but after nearly a week, not a sign was found. Then, five days later, the missing man’s truck was found 150 miles away, in the vastly wooded expanse known as the Moosehead Lake region in northern Maine. A day later, his body was found at the base of a tree near Kokadjo.

As it turns out, the missing man, in the flickering remnants of his rational mind, had gone to the remote area in search of a stranger, a 76-year-old woman who had wandered to Kokadjo days earlier in the fog of dementia. That woman had been rescued half frozen, wandering on a snow covered trail. She was already gone by the time her would-be rescuer came searching.

In the way of deranged minds, it has an element of sad romance, a Romeo and Juliet twist for the Alzheimer’s set.

But the story gets twister. As it happens, this man and woman who had never met were not the first to wander to Kokadjo in a fit of dementia. Drawn by forces the rest of us don’t understand, others have meandered there like flecks of metal sucked onto a magnet. Not a couple, not a handful but a dozen of them at least. Each suffering some form of mental malady, each guided to Kokadjo as though hypnotized.

According to warden service spokeswoman Deborah Turcotte, Young and Rutherford are among at least a dozen people over the last 20 years who have suffered from medical conditions and disappeared, or tried to, in the remote, sparsely populated Kokadjo and township areas north of Greenville on the east side of Moosehead Lake.

“For some reason, people are just drawn to this area,” Turcotte said.

One man from Central Maine made the journey to Kokadjo the very day he was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. The defect within his brain, perhaps, awakening another portion of that mysterious organ, one that guides the suffering soul to a far away place for… salvation? Deliverance?

Got me. What I do know is this. Kokadjo is not a place you stumble upon during an aimless ride on unfamiliar roads. It is sort of a last stop outpost before the wilderness around First Roach Pond. The last time I was there, the population was three. There was a tiny store where you might get beer, bait and a carton of smokes, provided one of the three was at home that day.

Today, there are some rental cabins there and a little more going on, though the sign at the edge of the tiny town still declares: “Population: Not Many.”

There are no icons in Kokadjo upon whose feet the stricken might fall in a desperate bid for mercy. There is no Lady of Lourdes to appeal to and no blessed pools from which to drink.

None that are obvious, anyway. Of course, the implication here is that something to which most of us are blind shines like a beacon to those with damaged minds.

No answers are forthcoming. Some who have migrated to Kokadjo died there in the wilderness. Others were saved but what secrets they knew of that place they craved were not shared with those with uncorrupted minds.

Pick your theory. Extraterrestrials with a wormhole in Moosehead lake calling home the subjects of intense experimentation? St. Peter waving the most feeble and vulnerable to the front of the line in an attempt to form an orderly procession to the Pearly Gates? A secret vernal pool of stagnant water with just the right chemical mix to heal the ailing mind?

I have some ideas of my own, but I’ll just hang on to them for now.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 1:34 am and is filed under Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.