Cancel the ambulance: More than a month ago, pseudonymous blogger Thomas Cushing Munjoy sent me an e-mail pointing out that the print edition of Consumer Reports magazine had cited Maine Medical Center in Portland as having the worst rate in the state of infections from large intravenous catheters. (This material doesn’t seem to be on Consumer Reports’ Web site, although statistics for some other states are.) MMC’s rate was also above the national average for infections at hospitals of similar size.

Munjoy wondered why the Portland Press Herald hadn’t jumped on this story. I figured the newspaper’s copy of the magazine hadn’t been delivered yet and decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

That doubt lasted a long time.

The Press Herald waited until March 1 to finally turn out its version in a piece by new health-beat writer John Richardson.

Predictably, the article is far more concerned with Maine Med’s spin on the numbers – the infection rate has declined, big hospitals always have higher rates because they get sicker patients, the data may be misleading – than that of patient advocates (one quote and it doesn’t even appear to apply specifically to MMC).

Over a month’s wait for so little.

Maine Med’s board is loaded with influential people. Running a critical story – for instance, one that included quotes from patients who contracted infections at the hospital – might annoy some of them. Wouldn’t want that to happen.

Deep stuff, but it’s not snow: Deirdre Fleming, MaineToday Media’s outdoor writer usually produces solid work, but she went soft on Boyne Resorts, operator of the Sugarloaf ski area, in her column in the Feb. 28 Maine Sunday Telegram, Kennebec Journal, and Morning Sentinel.

Fleming makes it clear Boyne and the CNL investment firm that owns the mountain are reluctant to get involved financially in Olympic gold medalist Seth Wescott’s campaign to construct a high-tech gondola lift on the mountain. But when it comes to why, she lets the companies slide off the hook with a few weasel words.

According to a Boyne executive, Sugarloaf’s owner and operator would only green light the plan “if it doesn’t consume credit capabilities of CNL or Boyne Resorts.”

What’s that mean? Fleming never says, but it appears the companies would be happy to have a gondola if somebody else takes out the loan and is ultimately responsible for paying it back. The prime candidate for that task isn’t mentioned in the column, but it’s likely the town of Carrabassett Valley (where I live and pay taxes).

There’s probably some pretty good material here in terms of how far municipal government should go in subsidizing a business (Carrabassett already owns a golf course, cross-country ski facility, and skating rink, all leased to Boyne at favorable rates). There’s also the obvious question of whether the gondola would produce enough additional revenue to pay for itself. The less-than-enthusiastic reaction from Boyne and CNL seems to indicate it wouldn’t.

If Fleming hadn’t flinched at challenging the companies’ version of the situation, she might have provided some insight into the situation. As it is, that stuff got buried in a drift.

Too long forgotten: Bill Clark died twenty-two years ago in 1988. It seems as if his memory didn’t survive much past that date.

Clark was a columnist for what were then the Guy Gannett Publishing newspapers (the Press Herald, Kennebec Journal, and Morning Sentinel). He was thoughtful, funny, wise, and occasionally (but not too often) sentimental in detailing the foibles of his fellow Mainers and himself. His “Some Logrolling” column ran from 1957 until his death, producing what should have been a lasting legacy of wit and wisdom on the changing nature of life in a state that didn’t much care for change. But sometimes legacies don’t work out that way.

Maybe that wouldn’t have bothered him. He had more important matters to contemplate.

“I can stand people,” he once wrote. “But I don’t like their permanent presence in planned proximity. I like to be with them and then I like to be alone. When I’m alone, I don’t want to know that there is a house fifty feet away in which lives another man who also wants to be alone.”

Clark wrote seven books, all of which are out of print (although North Country Press still seems to have some copies of “The Hills of Maine” for sale).

You can still pick up most of the others in good used bookshops, although I don’t think many people do. Last fall, I asked the proprietor of a Camden store if he had any Clark in stock. It took him fifteen minutes to find two volumes hidden away in storage. In a Saco bookstore, the owner had a large Maine section, but had never heard of Clark. He was as surprised as I was when I pulled a signed copy of one of his books from a dusty shelf.

For the past few years, I’ve made a practice of pestering the Maine Press Association’s nominating committee for the state’s journalism hall of fame to consider inducting Clark. But almost nobody in that august group remembers him, and I suppose it would be too much to expect them to spend a day or two wandering around in bookstores.

Like I said, I don’t think Clark would have cared that much. He had other things on his mind. Such as:

“Some men, when they walk, would rather walk the deep woods, harvested or untouched, either one, but never cleared or planned for anything but timber growth. I walk those woods at times because there is a satisfaction in knowing that there is twenty or thirty or fifty miles of woods beyond and that a man could press into them until he became a part of them, until he became a part of them in fact as well as in thought.”

I know it’s inevitable that even the memory of the most talented people will fall victim to the passage of time. I just don’t like to see it happen so fast. Particularly since Bill Clark wasn’t the type to forget the important stuff:

“Summer is activity time and the trouble with most modern small boy activity is that it is supervised and safety-ized until it is no more fun than reading “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” at a permissive pre-primary school.”

In the same vein:

“If a small boy is limited to legality in his summer fun, he is liable to lapse into complete lethargy. Organized leisure time activity never produced a Thomas Edison. It is more likely to produce the mediocrity that falls victim to Madison Avenue and the Jack Parr Show.”

Sadly, Jack Parr is still remembered. So is Jay Leno.

Clark was a conservative, in the sense of the word that’s long been obscured by petty political considerations. He believed in conserving the land by making it useful in both the short and long term. But he also believed no idea was so sacred as to be shielded from periodic re-examination by the young. During his time as a school teacher, he looked forward to the return of recently graduated students filled with “new” insights discovered in college.

“They are the creators of creeds and they are the defenders of the scholastic tradition that decrees that education is nothing if it is not a wild swinging at the premises of the past.”

That didn’t mean he embraced progress. He was once asked if he wanted to see a new computer. “I always look at machines,” he said. “A man should have as much knowledge of his enemies as he can get.”

His views on the economy were blessedly simple: “Borrowing money should be a friendly contest between imagination and credulity.”

He found life tough and troublesome, and he believed that was the way it was supposed to be.

“Ulcers and tensions are not much of a price to pay for the privilege of making our own decisions, on morality, on ethics, and on loyalty to lasting values.”

He was in favor of hard work and slow contemplation.

“It is in the hills that the lessons can be learned, for these hills are not the jagged peaks of the west. These hills are weathered. These hills support soil. They have seen men come and go. They have memories and if a man sits quietly on the slopes, he can profit from the sitting, because these hills are not defiant or antagonistic or resentful. They accept men.”

He sometimes suffered idiots, mostly because they sometimes made for good material.

“I could tell that the someone [next to me] was a public relations man because he shook both my hands while he patted my shoulder, meanwhile, in some display of dexterity which is no doubt confined to the craft, holding tightly to a drink and a barbecued beef sandwich.”

I never met Clark, although we talked briefly on the phone a couple of times. I like to think we’d have found a lot of common ground. Although, not on everything.

“I don’t like beer. I’m glad I don’t. It’s the beverage of moderation and I don’t want to be moderate. I want to stay intense. Coffee keeps you intense.”

Intensity was something to pursue. Happiness, not so much.

“So I am thankful for the gift of life. I have enjoyed every single moment of it, even the moments of the completest misery, even the agonies of the fiercest pains, even the black moods of bitterness. I have always known that I preferred the light of an anxious dawn to the continued blackness which postponed the moment of truth.”

And in a piece he wrote on the poet Robert Burns, he said what I’d have said of him if I had the skill:

He “left the lilt of magic words behind him.”

Al Diamon can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.

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