Catherine Dodge taught herself to drive and chop firewood as a child in Bristol before embarking on a career as a trucker, logger, and landscaper. Dodge, now a Nobleboro resident, is also a music lover and listened to hours upon hours of country music and oldies during her years on the road. (Molly Rains photo)
By Catherine Dodge’s calculations, over her 32-year career as a Class A truck driver, the lifelong Lincoln County resident covered nearly 2 million miles of road.
This adds up to about 80 complete circumnavigations of the Earth, yet Dodge covered all those miles entirely within the state of Maine – and the majority of them in Lincoln County – as a driver for Crooker Construction.
Thirty-two years on the road means Dodge knows Maine’s highways like the back of her hand. Trucking also taught Dodge how to be calm in high-pressure situations, like hauling many tons of reclaimed asphalt along the winding, narrow roads that run between Whitefield and Boothbay, one of her most frequent routes.
“You just have to keep a steady hand on the wheel,” Dodge said.
Driving comes naturally to Dodge, who first got behind the wheel at the age of 9 in her home town of Bristol.
Raised in the Upper Round Pond neighborhood with two siblings, Dodge began helping her parents around the house as a young child. Her father was disabled, and her mother was a homemaker; Dodge helped them by chopping and stacking firewood, feeding the coal furnace, and running errands.
“I’ve had a chainsaw since I was 9,” she said.
It was also at age 9 that Dodge started driving, also in the spirit of helping her parents.
Dodge climbed into the driver’s seat of her family’s Ford Model A and said she mostly had to figure out the mechanics on her own. Fortunately, she took to driving quickly and was soon running errands for her mother and father.
“The back was cut out to load firewood into,” Dodge said. “My mother used to send me down to the store to get stuff.”
The Upper Round Pond neighborhood was small and tight knit, and Dodge said nobody seemed to raise an eyebrow when they saw her behind the wheel of the Model A.
“Back then, there weren’t the cops around like there are today,” she said.
In her youth, Dodge was also close with her grandfather, who was a beekeeper.
“He’d come and get me, and we’d get in the truck and go tend to them,” she said.
Dodge attended the former Bristol High School and graduated with the class of 1967. Her class had about 40 students in it, a tight group who had grown up together, she recalled.
Dodge lost both of her parents before graduating from high school. Weathering their loss at a young age was difficult, Dodge said. It also made her even more independent.
After graduating, she decided to get away from her hometown for a time, enrolling at Aroostook State College – now the University of Maine at Presque Isle – in fall 1967 to study physical education.
Dodge enjoyed the curriculum and studied for two years in the program. However, she changed course after she became pregnant with her son, Damian, in 1969, ending her studies and moving back to Lincoln County.
Dodge moved into a house on School Street in Damariscotta and began working as a landscaper. As a young mother, she practiced a variety of trades, including lobstering and crabbing on the Damariscotta River, mowing lawns, and working as an arborist.
Eventually, her love of working with vehicles and trees led Dodge to begin working for Nobleboro resident Albert Kaufmann’s logging company and later Palmer Forest Products. Dodge felled trees and operated a skidder. Experience cutting firewood in her youth made Dodge well versed in forestry.
“You just look at the tree and see how it’s leaning,” she said, describing how to prepare to fell a tree safely.
Eventually, Dodge’s career led her to get her Class A license and begin trucking. Dodge began working for Topsham-based Harry C. Crooker Construction, now known simply as Crooker Construction, in the mid-1980s.
Most days, Dodge drove reclaim from Whitefield to Boothbay, making as many as 11 trips in a day. However, over the years she worked at a range of different job sites and with different contractors on behalf of Crooker Construction.
Working behind the wheel led to a number of hair-raising moments, Dodge recalled, from popping a wheelie while spreading asphalt along Lynch Road in Newcastle to the time the clutch blew out on her fully loaded vehicle, causing it to roll downhill before flipping over and trapping Dodge in the cab.
As the mishap unfolded, Dodge recalled, she said to herself, “Hang on!”
“I had to climb out through the passenger’s door onto the side of the truck and then get myself down,” she said.
Dodge loved trucking. Improvements to the vehicles made the job easier as the years went on, she said.
“It was the easiest job I ever had. Just flip a lever to do this. And the last (truck) I had was an automatic (transmission),” she said. Above all, Dodge liked working with local contractors and the other members of the Crooker Construction team.
Dodge retired from Crooker Construction around 2018. It was a difficult decision, she said; she sometimes misses the routine and community she found driving.
During her career, Dodge said she was one of only a handful of female truckers who worked for the company. Dodge always felt trusted and respected by her managers and was proud to often be the first truck on scene at a new job site.
While on the road, Dodge always listened to music. Generally, she’d tune the radio to a country western station or “oldies and goodies,” she said.
A love of music has also colored Dodge’s life outside work. She continues to listen to the radio daily and is the proud steward of a collection of more than 3,000 vinyl records, not to mention even more albums in the form of 45s and CDs, she said.
Dodge has been building her music collection since she was a teenager. She doesn’t limit herself to country and oldies: everything from Zydeco to traditional German and Irish albums can be found in her music library.
Dodge, a musician herself, used to play folk guitar, though she said she’s out of practice.
“Now, I can’t carry a tune even if it’s in a suitcase,” she joked.
Dodge’s collections aren’t limited to music. In a dedicated “book room” at her home, she also stewards more than 5,000 books, from novels to cookbooks. Prominent among her collection are cookbooks authored by old friends, as well as an extensive collection of gardening and landscaping books.
Dodge also loves lighthouses and collects lighthouse-themed home decorations, figurines, and other trinkets.
While Lincoln County has seen “plenty of ups and downs” in its day, Dodge said she has always liked living in a tight-knit community. She moved from Damariscotta to Nobleboro five years ago and has enjoyed the change, she said. Her son continues to live nearby, and works as a demolition contractor, she said. In the years to come, Dodge plans to continue enjoying her music and book collections.
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