The Land of Ago

The Land of Ago is Mike Noonan’s name for a past that seems to gather all time into one remembered summer. Also called the Kingdom of When-I-Was-a-Boy, it takes shape as a golden vision of communal life along Dark Score Lake—but the vision is shadowed by the racism, silences, and violence that nostalgia can soften without undoing.

A Past Outside Ordinary Time

The Land of Ago is not confined to a single securely dated scene. Mike sees a summer afternoon that might belong to 1898, 1902, or 1907; the year matters less than the impression that time has stopped. In the old-timers’ recollection, endless late-July sunlight gilds the lake, whose surface is blue and bright with reflected sparks. The Street, once grown over and neglected, appears broad, smooth, and open: a boulevard where people meet and the community recognizes itself.

The scene makes an intangible social connection visible. Mike has sensed unseen cables running beneath life at the TR; in the vision, The Street becomes their point of origin and main conduit. People promenade in small groups, talking and laughing, while everyday exchanges—sports, weather, crops, politics, and children—make the lakeshore feel like shared civic ground. The remembered place is valuable not simply because it is picturesque, but because it offers an image of neighbors depending on one another in a time without electricity, telephones, or a County Rescue Unit.

The Community and Its Boundaries

The vision also makes room for outsiders. Summer visitors from Warrington's mingle with local residents: tennis players talk with young men from town, and a New York visitor asks to join a baseball game. Such encounters suggest that The Street can connect people who might otherwise remain apart. Mike’s perception changes as he watches: the residents no longer seem like alien figures, but like ordinary people living close to hardship and the darkness of the woods, gathering at the lake when the weather is fine.

Yet the remembered community was never equally open to everyone. At the turn of the century, more than forty Black people settled on the land that became Tidwell's Meadow. The musical group that included many of them—first called The Red-Tops and later Sara and the Red-Tops—bought the meadow and a substantial stretch of lakeshore from Douglas Day. Son Tidwell negotiated the purchase with money saved over ten years. Local opposition had been strong enough to prompt a protest meeting against their arrival, and the expected shanty settlement was instead a collection of neat white cabins around a larger communal building.

The group performed around western Maine for more than a year, perhaps close to two, and was popular on the regional circuit. The account of local acceptance, however, is measured by a meager standard: people said the newcomers paid their bills, kept to themselves, and did not take charity. That language presents isolation as virtue and conditional tolerance as goodwill. The later newspaper clippings’ genial, demeaning descriptions of the performers make the contradiction still clearer: public admiration did not displace the racial contempt through which white audiences regarded them.

Sara on The Street

Sara Tidwell’s presence exposes the gap between the ideal of communal belonging and the restrictions imposed on it. In the remembered voice of Jared Devore’s racist account, Sara is described as having been warned to stay off The Street, yet she walks there in a white dress, sometimes with her son, Kito. The account insists that nobody spoke to her; Mike challenges that version, recalling that townspeople did talk with her, that women showed her their babies and asked her about boys, and that men looked at her with desire.

That distinction matters to the memory of The Street. Sara’s presence was not merely tolerated at a distance: her ability to elicit ordinary conversation and attention unsettled the racial boundary Jared wanted enforced. The Land of Ago therefore contains both the image of a community in contact and the evidence of who was told that contact was forbidden. Its golden light does not make the hostility disappear; it gives Mike a place from which to see the hostility inside the idyll.

Memory, Violence, and the Name

The Land of Ago is also where the past remains active rather than safely finished. Mike’s encounter with it brings him toward the history of Fred Dean and his daughter Carla during the 1933 fires. In the vision, Fred carries the child into the lake amid smoke and fire, telling himself that he is saving her, even as she struggles beneath his hands. The scene’s language of baptism and sacrifice gives terrible form to a concealed act of violence. The remembered past thus links communal history to the harm passed down through families and generations.

The later reflection that “the past dies slower” than people expect helps define the expression’s wider force. What appears to be a golden age is also a storehouse of exclusions, resentments, and unacknowledged acts; its stories survive in local memory even when people avoid speaking of them. The Land of Ago is consequently both an image of lost fellowship and a means of recovering what nostalgia leaves out. Mike’s vision turns The Street into a place of connection, but the histories of Sara and Carla prevent that connection from being mistaken for innocence.