The Elephant of Surprise: a heartfelt backwoods love story

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Hamlin is a remote Maine college town just down the road from the Odessa paper mill, a company run by an eccentric egomaniac -- or so everyone thinks. In the fall of 1973 Hamlin College welcomes a new student. Andy Vicandoro, in his initial visit to the area and fresh out of uniform from a plum assignment in Europe, is readily hired to pump fuel at a bustling local truck stop while starting a full load of classes.

He is shaken, though, by two recent fatalities, two friends who died one after the other in separate tragedies, both events occurring even as Andy stood not far away. As he settles in to resume civilian life he is tormented by the suspicion that if he had done one small thing -- anything -- differently for each of those friends before their final moments maybe neither would have died.

Cautious about getting too familiar with anyone new, fearing that to befriend someone will imperil another life, he tries to remain aloof. His purpose is to get on with his education, work hard at menial labor to pay for it, and ponder the jinx he seems to be in others’ lives.

People are drawn to the amiable loner though. He is kind, helpful, approachable, and acceptably good-looking, and the beguiling girls in the small college town weaken his resolve for detachment. Soon enough a classmate, Jack Dershem, challenges Andy’s reluctance and goads him to ask a diligent, quick-witted waitress, Aimee Cassell, for a date. She finds him odd but intriguing and gives him a chance.

Taking a summer job as a spare laborer in the intrinsically dangerous paper mill, Andy buddies up to a fellow worker and family man whose head seems screwed on straight. Blindsided, however, by a duplicitous acquaintance, in the aftermath of a misunderstanding with Aimee he is swept up by a provocative budding artist, Jeanie Wisdom, who inadvertently leads him to a shocking connection with his past and another stunning connection with his future, but not before one more friend goes down in Andy’s presence.

While he contemplates the sobering side to everyone’s mortal existence and the many ways a promising romance can be derailed, and while his chronicle is interrupted now and then by irrelevant characters too interesting to exclude, more than anything else The Elephant of Surprise is a heartfelt backwoods love story.