CUMBERLAND, Maine — When police asked Evan Casas if he was positive the drums for sale online were his beloved set, stolen from a storage unit last year, he didn’t hesitate.
“I told them I was 1,000 percent sure,” Casas said. They were like no other, and he’d know them anywhere.
The veteran percussionist had played the custom maple set at hundreds of gigs and recording sessions since a college friend made them for him 25 years ago, when they were both freshmen at the University of Southern Maine.
Casas’ positive identification led to a Hollywood-style police sting involving a wire, a secret code word and his old friend’s wife’s aunt. No one has yet been arrested, but Casas did get his drums back, which is all he really cares about.
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The wild story started with a phone call in February from a security person making her rounds at the New Gloucester storage facility where Casas was storing the drums and other possessions while building a house. She told him the lock was missing from his unit, which was odd.
When he got to the unit, he immediately saw his drums were missing, along with several other items. It broke his heart.
Casas’ college friend and fellow drummer, Scott Ciprari, made the honey-colored set while both were music education students living in Robie-Andrews Hall on USM’s Gorham campus a quarter century ago. Ciprari went on to co-found the SJC Drum company which now counts drummers from Dropkick Murphys, Rancid and Sum 41 as clients.
“The third kit that he ever made was my kit,” Casas said. “They were very special to me — my first real drums.”
Casas filed a police report but doubted he’d ever see them again.
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“I was devastated. I was emotionally attached to them,” Casas said. “I honestly grieved for them like I lost a family member.”
He got on with finishing his house, being a husband and raising his two daughters. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, SJC drum aficionados sprang into action.
Casas isn’t on social media, but his old pal Ciprari is, along with the 5,000-member SJC Drums Community Facebook group. There, members fanned out, scouring Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace and other online swaps, looking for anyone fencing the purloined drums. Eventually, in December — 10 months after they went missing — a member of Ciprari’s extended family located them.
“It was my wife’s aunt who found them,” Ciprari said, still somewhat surprised.
When Casas got the word, he used his wife’s social media account to look. Sure enough, there they were, offered for $1,500 on Facebook, just one town away from where they were stolen.
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Resisting the urge to just buy them back and be done with it, Casas called the Cumberland County Sheriff’s detective assigned to his case. The detective assured him they’d get the drums back, then suggested an elaborate plan, if Casas was game.
He was and set up a meeting with the seller.
Reached for comment last week, the detective could only say the investigation was ongoing.
According to Casas, on New Year’s Eve morning, he met two deputies and a plainclothed detective behind the saltshed at a Maine DOT maintenance yard. The detective, a gun in his waistband and with a wireless microphone, got into Casas’ car. The deputies followed at a discreet distance as they headed for the house selling the drums.
“The plan was, once I could confirm that they were mine, I was to say, ‘These drums look legit,’” Casas said. “And then the detective would say, ‘Oh, they’re legit, huh, so you want to buy them?’ That was the code word for the deputies to roll up.”
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When they got inside, Casas recognized the drums in an instant. His daughter’s pink baby blanket was still stuffed in the bass drum, where he’d put it to help deaden the sound. Casas then played his part, pretending to go out to his truck for the money while the deputies arrived.
Police later told Casas they didn’t arrest the woman selling the drums because she was conducting the transaction on behalf of a family member, according to Casas. Casas remembers the young woman looking stunned and very scared.
“I felt awful. I felt like a dad with daughters,” he said “I didn’t want to ruin anyone else’s day. I just needed to get my drums back.”
To celebrate their return, Casas’ daughters asked if he could take their picture with the drums. He did.
The original maker of the drums is also happy for their homecoming.
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“I hope those drums get passed down as a family heirloom,” Ciprari said. “He was one of the first guys who supported me. Those drums mean a lot.”
His house now completed, Casas said he’ll now be keeping the drums at home, where he can play them.
As a young man, I read Hemingway and Steinbeck, Harrison and McGuane. Along the way, the fly-fishing raconteur Richard Brautigan brought tears to my eyes while the rabid environmentalist Edward Abbey had me raising my fists in outrage.
I took to heart the words of Gary Snyder, the acclaimed poet turned Buddhist, found in his thought-provoking book, “Practice of the Wild”:
“The wild requires… we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home.”
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Over the years, I’ve tried to follow his advice, attempting from time to time to tell a good story when returning home from the Rangeley Lakes Region of western Maine. My wife and I have owned a camp there for more than 40 years.
This part of the Pine Tree State has not changed much. Logging roads have replaced some river routes that once carried timber to mills across the New Hampshire border. Grand hotels catering to wealthy sports may be gone. But the rivers, streams and ponds surrounding our cabin are much the same as Johnny Danforth and Fred Baker found them when they spent the winter of 1876 hunting and trapping above Parmachenee Lake.
This region is known for its brook trout, fish that have called these waters home since glaciers receded more than 10,000 years ago. They are not as large as they once were, but a 16-inch native brook trout is not uncommon and certain to make an angler’s heart flutter. Landlocked salmon, introduced in the late 1800s, are now as wild as the moose that sometimes plod down to the shoreline to muse over the mysteries of the conifer forest.
When Trish and I first arrived, I cast large streamers and weighted nymphs in a manic pursuit for ever-larger fish. I wore a vest with more fly boxes than Samuel Carter had little liver pills. My pack was heavy with reels spooled with lines that sank at different rates, along with extra clothing for northern New England’s constantly changing weather.
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Such angling requires time on the water, especially after the spring thaw, which in western Maine may not begin until mid-May.
This is when ice leaves the lakes and smelts, the region’s principal bait fish, enter the big rivers to spawn, with brook trout and landlocked salmon following closely behind.
By late September, trout and salmon swim up rivers like the Magalloway, Kennebago, Cupsuptic and Rapid on their own spawning runs. This provides a second opportunity to take fish measured in pounds rather than inches.
I have fished in rain and sleet, under snow squalls and blistering sun. I was buffeted by wind and harassed by black flies, mosquitoes and no-see-ums. Rapids threatened to take me under, and storms sent the occasional lightning bolt my way. All while I stripped streamers across dark pools and bounced nymphs over river bottoms from first light until after dark. I am addicted to the tug of fish measured in pounds rather than inches.
As the years passed, I discovered another type of fishing, one found on the many tannin-stained brooks that slip across the Canadian border. These streams twist through balsam and spruce for mile after mile. Some have no names, others form the headwaters of larger rivers where most anglers continue their search for trophy fish.
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Along these secret rills, I have learned to enjoy casting my flies to brook trout far smaller than those in the big rivers. A few are no longer than a finger, the largest fitting in the palm of a hand. In these narrow ribbons of water, hidden under shadows cast by a vast conifer forest, I have come to appreciate what Thoreau described as “…these jewels…these bright fluviatile flowers, made beautiful, the Lord only knows why, to swim there.”
Now, on the losing side of middle age, I seek waters too small to gather attention from other anglers — forgotten places where trout live under boulders, in shadows cast by conifer branches, along undercut banks, or hiding in plain sight in sunlit riffles. These are fish that have rarely heard a wading boot or the splash of an artificial fly.
This type of fishing requires an angler to heed the words of the legendary American naturalist John Muir, who wrote, “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.”
No longer do I feel compelled to wing heavy flies past my ear or make 60-foot casts until my shoulder aches. I carry a single metal tin that fits in the pocket of my canvas shirt. Once holding cough drops, it now holds a handful of flies: pheasant-tail dry flies, patterns with parachute wings for casting upstream, a few elk hair caddis or black ants for summer and fixed-winged and soft-hackled hare’s ear wet flies for when I work downstream.
I leave my 8-foot fly rod constructed of space-age material at the cabin. Instead, I carry a 6-foot-6-inch rod, made of cane the color of maple syrup, the good stuff produced at the end of the season and once classified as grade B. I could never afford such a rod but bought this one secondhand. The cork base is stained from its prior owner.
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Seated on a lichen-covered boulder or fallen tree trunk, I sometimes wonder who might cast this little bit of fishing history after my time on this whirling orb ends.
When a 6-inch brook trout splashes through the surface, my mind is free to be in the moment. With less distraction, I enjoy the creatures along the edges of running water — the mink slinking around boulders on the opposite bank or the beaver slapping its tail so loud it sounds like a shotgun echo.
Sometimes it is simply the flash of a tiny warbler or the song of a secretive thrush. I catch myself smiling at the splash of a frog or staring into the eyes of a bashful toad no larger than a button.
Seated by the wood stove on a November evening, a mug of tea warm against my palms, the sound of hail pinging against the windows as it mixes with damp snow, I can retrieve these moments that, like a Basho haiku, remain frozen in time.
Tramping through western Maine’s fields and forest, casting a fly while kneeling on a mossy bank, holding my breath in anticipation of a rising fish, I escape the madding pace of modern life.
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As long as my legs allow, I will tread that trail less traveled — the one alongside a stream where brook trout play tag with a bit of feather and fur — and return to tell a tale or two.
In our world of day-to-day changes and challenges, it was a joy to read the Press Herald article “Maine students weigh in on first mock referendum election” (Oct. 29).
The article featured a mock election for Morse High School Students in Bath. However, mock elections also took place in 78 schools all across our state. Referendum 1 and Referendum 2 were on the students’ ballots. A third question was whether the voter believes in the Declaration of Independence and whether the voter thinks it is relevant to today.
Kudos to the Department of the Secretary of State for creating and overseeing this mock election program for students. The program encourages students to be excited about and familiar with the voting process. The program also provides a forum for discussion and critical thinking about current issues. What a pleasure it was to have read this exceptionally positive article.
With Maine Gov. Janet Mills set to term out after eight years, the field for the November 2026 gubernatorial election is packed with candidates with a spectrum of experience and views. Those running as either Democrats or Republicans will first face off against each other in the June 9, 2026 primaries in an effort to […]
