It’s Called A Haith.

Photo courtesy of Pinterest

A couple of weeks ago Bud & I were driving through the back roads when he said to me, “You’ve probably noticed this too, since you spent years driving for work like I did, but did you ever notice how a lot of small towns in Maine have roads all named the same? You know like every town has a Town Farm Rd.” This caused me to stop and look at the next road sign we came upon and he wasn’t wrong! There was the Horseback Rd, like I had seen in many other small towns.

One would expect most cities and towns to have a Main St. Even an Elm St., Church St. or the ever popular Pleasant St. Many cities especially have all of those numbered streets, First, Second, Third, etc. But when you get further out of the cities and into rural Maine you start to find some similarities that have historical significance associated with them. Take for instance the Town Farm Road. Back in a time when it was culturally inappropriate to be running up debts, and there were no government funded safety nets, if you fell on hard times and got behind in your finances, you or your entire family had to go live at the Town Farm. This is where you would work for your own food and lodging until you could pay off your debts or get back on your feet to be able to provide for yourself and your family. So just about every town had a Town Farm and the road leading to it would have been called the Town Farm Road. Similar reasons can be found for common road names like Ferry Rd, the road that led down to the river where the ferry was! Or the Stagecoach Rd, Horseback Rd or even Railroad St.

I love it that Bud & I have these conversations. We both love history, so often our conversations have a historical tinge to them. So it was nice to have this discussion in the car as we traveled 45 minutes through rural Maine to buy used books at a yard sale. Yes he loves books as much as I do and was willing to drive 45 minutes away to look at some. I am very lucky!

So last night as we drove into town to pick up a pizza for dinner I noticed a road sign that I’d also seen in a lot of other towns, so I pointed it out to Bud. “There’s a road name you see in a lot of towns. The Bog Rd.” He nodded and responded with his Downeast “a-yuh” that I love so much.

“Seems like every town has a bog.” I said “So naturally every town has a Bog Rd.” He was quiet for a moment and then said “Steuben doesn’t.”

“They don’t have a Bog Rd?” I asked him.

“No they don’t have a bog.” he replied.

“What do you mean Steuben doesn’t have a bog?” I asked, “Every town has a bog.”

“Well Steuben don’t.” I wasn’t going to fight him on it. Steuben is his hometown, he grew up there and from the stories he tells I can guarantee you he’s walked all over most of that town either as a young boy looking for something to do or while out hunting! So if he says there’s no bog, there is no bog!

“Well that’s strange.” I said pondering on the concept that just about everywhere else in Maine has a low spot that’s kind of swampy. “I would have thought there would be a swamp or something similar out that way. Just about every where else has a bog.”

“Steuben doesn’t have a bog, just the haith.” he said matter of factly.

“The what?”

“The haith.” he replied.

“What the heck is a haith?”

“It’s a swampy area.”

“So a bog.”

“No, it’s called the haith.”

He drove along the road confident in his statement while I scanned my brain for the word haith. I love vocabulary words, pride myself on being able to pull some doozies out of my hat every once in a while, but I had never heard of haith. So I said “How do you spell that?”

He laughed that deep cheerful laugh of his and said “I don’t know how to spell it, I just say it.” So I grabbed my phone and googled Haith, Hayth, Haeth, and on and on until we pulled into the pizza shop.

“There is no such word.” I said as I got out of the car. My tone indicated that I was right, seeing as I was master of all things word related. I smiled at him as I started to shut the door. “No such word!”

“Sure there is!” he yelled out, with that Downeast twang in his voice. “We always said go over they-ah toward the haith.” I laughed and shut the car door. While I stood in line to get the pizza though, I puzzled over this word in my mind. He was clearly pronouncing it like faith, only with an “h” sound. So it had to be spelled like faith right?

The whole way home, with the smell of warm pizza filling the car, we bantered back and forth about this word. He insisted it was a real word and I said I had never heard of such a thing. Now to be fair to him, Downeast Maine is a culture all on its own. Something I realized shortly after he and I met. One of our very first conversations included him telling me this: “They done put the chase to me and once they caught me, I got all stove up.” I felt like I needed a translator on that one!

After we got home we took the pizza out to the deck to eat and I continued questioning him about his haith.

“Are you sure it’s not a heath. I’ve heard of a heath.” I said. Heath is also a term commonly used in England, the place from whence most New Englanders came.

“What’s a heath?” he asked me.

“Well it’s like a bog, or a swampy area. Could even be an area in the woods that’s kind of cleared out, just growing scrubby low bushes.”

I could see his mind thinking on that for a while. “Maybe, but it ain’t called a heath. It’s called the haith.”

Long into the night I lay in bed thinking about his haith. I thought about the men and women who came from England hundreds of years ago to settle along Maine’s far eastern rocky coast. How their dialect changed and became something distinct due to their isolation. It’s not quite British but not quite Boston either. It’s unique. It’s Downeast Maine. In Bud I hear words and phrases that reflect a time and culture that seems almost foreign to me in many ways. It occurred to me that if there is a bog or swampy area in Steuben it was probably originally called the heath. Over time, and with that deep Downeast dialect, it changed, at least in Bud’s family, to the haith. This seemed to me the most plausible explanation.

There are lots of words in our language that we use to describe the same thing. Soda or Pop for example. Ghost or Spirit. Bog, Swamp, Heath or even a Haith. It really doesn’t matter what sound comes out of your mouth. If the group of people you live with understand you then that’s all that matters. And apparently everyone in Steuben knows what the haith is.

I think it’s interesting that Bud has his own word. In fact I liked the idea so much I decided to write this blog about it. See, if I put haith out there into the vast space of the digital world it will live forever. So the next time someone hears the word haith and decides to Google that…..

Haith: a swampy wetland or area of low growing bushes most likely located in the town of Steuben Maine. Etymology source: Bud

T-shirts available next year at the campground store! ; )