In Woods Where Thoreau Got Lost
We are paddling on wind-hazed water, in another century. Spruce, jack pine and balsam cozen the shore of this drinkable lake, an unbroken expanse of green under a cloud-streaked sky that is both broad, and intimate. Floating below us, the inverted reflection of Spencer Mountain is scored by the long, straight wakes of two cruising loons.
Maine, for me, has always been synonymous with the outdoors and the ramblings of Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden and the assertion, made in a time before boom boxes and squealing electronic devices, that people “lead lives of quiet desperation.” But he wrote another book that captured a different place and different sentiments, The Maine Woods, about the wild north country that made me, when I read it, want to see a moose knee-deep in a tea-colored river and discover other remnants of a landscape that profoundly moved this the most famous of American nature writers.
A few hours earlier, I stood in a barn down in Willimantic, Maine, with a handful of other pilgrims. “There aren’t too many ‘don’ts’,” Garrett Conover was telling us. “Don’t use the ax. Don’t talk to us during dinner prep, and don’t relieve yourselves less than two see-fars from the water.” A see-far is the distance you can see into the woods while standing on the bank. “There’s no giardia where we’re going. You don’t want to go down in history as the one who introduced it.”
He wore a belt with a moose etched into the buckle. His beard was reminiscent of Thoreau’s, his gaze fixed on a point several see-fars in the distance. His wife, Alexandra, stood next to him in battered Stetson, scarf and wool vest; both sported the familiar Maine guide “shoe,” really a rubber boot with a leather upper. Their barn was loaded with traditional expeditionary gear: a 16-foot birch bark canoe made in the style of the Penobscot Indians, snowshoes of bent ash and rawhide, and pack baskets of beaten ash strips they made themselves. A dozen “blanks” of drying ash hung in a side room, to be carved into paddles with a traditional north woods crooked knife.
The rest of us look considerably less Thoreauvian in floppy hats and rip-stop nylon jackets, all of us “from away,” as they say in Maine: Susanna, an artist from Chicago; Robyn, a social worker from Manhattan; Svea, a retired nurse from Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau’s home (”I have traveled a good deal in Concord.”); Svea’s granddaughter, Sofia, nine years old, half American, half Italian, from Bologna, in pink boots; a professional photographer, Jim, from Kansas; and me, a writer from the environs of the nation’s capital quietly desperate to escape them in July.
We had all received the same letter from the Conovers telling us what sort of trip to expect. “If you are reluctant to part from radios, cell phones, satellite phones, and your lap top computers, please seriously consider not participating… Much of the magic in wildlands trips comes from engagement with the present, with natural conditions, and with the temporary tribe of each group.”
Our tribe is now about to camp on Lobster Lake. We quickly learn the set-up dance: canoe unloading, tent site selection, tent erection and, finally, body immersion. The lake is cold enough to get even a Mainer’s attention. “Step into my office,” says Svea after the swim, and we take turns sitting with her at a picnic table provided by the Maine Department of Forestry, for pulse readings. She is learning about “plant spirit,” and explains, “I would like to take each of your pulses everyday. The Chinese say that’s an integral part of the healing process.” I doubt that Thoreau would have been sympathetic to the notion of plants having spirits, despite his transcendentalism, but he would have found it interesting and no doubt would have recorded the experience.
Thoreau made three visits to north-central Maine—in 1849, to climb Mount Katahdin, and in 1853 and 1857 to the headwaters of the Penobscot and Allagash rivers. Along the way he encountered hunters, loggers, and other explorers and passed through a continuous forest that seemed inexhaustible. He took notes about plants, birds, mammals and other natural phenomena and commented on things as various as the stars and the destructive habits of his fellow human beings. He wasn’t after financial gain, or sport, but knowledge, valuing wilderness not for its product but for the inspiration and wisdom it could impart to his and future generations.
I am confident that he would have documented the Conovers’ cooking routine as well, had he been with us. Garrett has fetched spruce while Alexandra arranged the pack baskets and food boxes (”wannagins”). He cuts foot-long logs with a bow saw assembled for that purpose while she sets two poles in ground, lashes the galley pole between them, and suspends buckets on chains. Garrett expertly splits the logs with a fine Swedish ax, produces a flurry of wood shavings and then a crackling fire; Alexandra has the biscuits in motion. He makes a pot of his “decapitated” (decaffeinated) coffee while she peels potatoes and gets the steaks ready. He assembles a skillet 18-inches across out of a canvas case and she prepares the salad.
“Around here the name Thoreau brings a groan,” she is saying. “When he came through in 1857 he refused to exchange news of the outside world with a family living at the portage to the Allagash. Thoreau just took off down the trail, and then he got lost. The story was picked up by all the guides in the Chesuncook region, and they have long memories. I heard it from our mentor, Mickey Fahey, who heard it from his, Tommy Smart, who heard it from a guide who was alive at the time.”
The tradition of the official Maine guide goes back to 1897, when they were accredited by the state to promote the beauty of Maine and to assure clients from points south that the forests, lakes and rivers were user friendly. The first was a woman, six-foot Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby who wrote a newspaper column and convinced one of the railroads operating in Maine to send her to a sportsman’s convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden with a genuine log cabin and a stuffed moose. So Alexandra is part of an old tradition, but Maine woods lore is much older, and it is the early traditions that got the Conovers interested in making their own pemmican and moccasins sewn from smoked deer hide, and in natural pursuits not related to hunting and fishing. They began their apprenticeships fresh out of college in Massachusetts more than 20 years ago, with liberal arts degrees and a desire to study under the legendary Maine woodsman, Mick Fahey. “Garrett and I were already competent outdoors people,” as Alexandra points out. “Then Mick asked me if I wanted to learn to paddle. I was insulted.”
Fahey had learned his skills from Smart and from members of the Penobscott tribe he encountered as a younger man. He taught the Conovers, among other things, to put their bodies into 40-60 strokes a minute, with a paddling style and rhythm used by Indians, trappers and voyageurs of an earlier age, known alternately as the Maine stroke, the Canadian stroke, and the north woods stroke. Fahey taught them much more—”not just to question but to understand nature—astronomy, limnology, forestry. We got so much from him and other old-timers. They opened windows that led to everywhere.”
Garrett later wrote the ultimate treatise on poling canoes, Beyond the Paddle, and together he and Alexandra wrote, A Snowwalker’s Companion. Neither of these is in the camp library—a clear plastic bag—but I do find A Canoeists’s Sketchbook by Robert Kimber, The Book of Swamp and Bog by John Eastman, The One-Eyed Poacher of Maine by one Edmund Wayne Smith, and The Wildest Country, a Guide to Thoreau’s Maine edited by J. Parker Huber.
That night, under a crisp quarter moon, a loon calls. The sound is often described as demented but to me is the pure, unrestrained voice of the wild, repeated and answered from across the water.
I awake to the crack of Garrett’s ax against fresh spruce logs, rise to the smell of bacon in the big skillet and dine on hashbrowns and eggs to the tune of Sofia’s jokes. (”What do invisible cats drink?… Evaporated milk!”) Soon I am leaning into my new north woods stroke, on the Penobscot River, watching weeds on the bottom sway like golden hair in the current. A family of Mergansers swims noisily away, a belted kingfisher scolds. Every now and then we dip our cups into the water to drink, a rare opportunity in America today, though one Thoreau would have taken for granted.
He traveled in 1853 with his cousin, George Thatcher, and an Indian guide, Joe Aitteon, who provided ducks for their breakfast, to go with tea and hard bread; Aitteon spent most of his time trying to shoot a moose. When he succeeded, Thoreau carefully measured it. “I did not wish to be obliged to say merely that the moose was very large.”
Our tribe has moose on the mind, too. We find tracks of Alces alces Americana in the mud adjacent to our next camping spot, upstream of Ragmuff Stream. The cloven hoof marks look huge. Thoreau wrote, “this hunting of moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him… is too much like going out by night to some wood-side pasture and shooting your neighbor’s horses.” We wanted the simpler satisfaction of seeing one.
Thoreau stayed just up the hill from our next camp site, in what was known as Smith’s Halfway House, for Ansel Smith who provided lodging for loggers and later moved a bit south, to the shore of Chesuncook Lake. The foundations are still visible, as is the rock-lined well in the pasture taken over by bunchberry, wild pink roses and red hawkweed. Fodder was grown here for draught horses used in the days when trees were cut and dumped into the rivers, where they stayed until spring thaw carried them south.
“Thoreau could not have foreseen that so much of this would remain,” Garrett says, showing us around. However, clear-cutting has eliminated vast stretches of forest just beyond the tree-lined banks, and now there is little but cut-over country a few see-fars from the last drinkable river on the eastern seaboard. These lovely woods are little more than a screen for one of the great timber bonanzas of all time.
In Thoreau’s day, logging and hunting were the reasons one traveled in the woods. He went against the grain when he wrote, “Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.” That was close to heresy in the twilight of Manifest Destiny, when the building blocks for a young nation were still coming out of places like this. It seems to me, looking at the remains of Smith’s forgotten enterprise and considering the effect of massive clear-cuts beyond the river’s fringe of trees, that Thoreau’s genius was not in taking off for the wilderness and making sense of the experience, but in having the imagination and daring to question prevailing attitudes about its use considered anti-social and no doubt anti-American. Now we’re at the ass-end of the headlong exploitation of phenomenal resources that was already humming when Thoreau passed through.
By the time camp is set up a certain easefulness prevails. Susanna and Sofia sit on the bank, painting with watercolors; Svea has Robyn stretched out on the ground, to “release tension” by passing her hands through the air above “bad energy fields.” She asks Robyn, whose eyes are dutifully shut, what color she would like to see, and Robyn says, “Sky blue,” which is the overarching hue in this remarkably dry, insect-free passage through country notorious for precipitation and bugs.
Supper is Cornish game hen, parboiled, split and roasted in the skillet, seasoned with paprika, garnished with sauteed chopped celery and almonds and served with rice and squash sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. Passing clouds briefly release raindrops that dimple the river but distract no one from dessert: pineapple upside-down cake that inspires Sofia to squeeze her fingers together in an Italianate gesture of pure perfection. This sort of camp life is a dying art in an age dominated by freeze-dried protein and carbos inhaled for biking up the next mountain. But real food leads to real contemplation in a sepia, stop-frame moment, and I imagine Henry David scribbling on his scraps of paper and Joe Aitteon inspecting his leaky bark canoe.
Before bed I open The Wildest Country and learn that the dying Thoreau’s last words were “moose,” and “Indians.” In the middle of the night I am awakened by the sound of something large stamping about in the shallows, crawl out of my tent and find Robyn already about, wearing a headlamp. “Moose!’ she whispers, having seen it clamber up the far bank.
The river slows and broadens south of the Hay Islands. They were named for fodder grown there to feed the hearty Percherons that hauled logs in Thoreau’s day and stayed on the islands year-round. Before we know it we are on Chesuncook Lake, an Indian word meaning “a place where many streams emptied in.” A bald eagle tilts high above this luminous, ever-expanding realm that pushes the far bank into the distance.
We are faced with two days of flat water, but first will spend a night on sheets, at River House, built on the site of Ansel Smith’s structures in 1864. The original homestead included a blacksmith shop, an icehouse, a barn, and a log house that Thoreau considered “but a slight departure from the hollow tree.” All that is gone now, the white clapboard house that replaced it owned by a young couple from Massachusetts, the Surprenants, who decided to escape with their five children to a simpler era.
David Surprenant meets us on the shore, in trim beard and Bermudas, loads our gear into a trailer and hauls it up to the broad front porch that overlooks the water and the mile-high thrust of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s reigning peak. The village of Chesuncook is readily accessible only by boat. A dirt road crosses marshes that require serious all-terrain capability, and the Surprenants use a World War II troop carrier to bring in their supplies.
Chesuncook has a dozen year-round residents. The Conovers lead our tribe to The Store in the Woods, for a bottle of homemade root beer, and then on to the village church. Pilgrim’s Hymnals are scattered over the seats, to be picked up when the old pump organ begins to wheeze. Each Sunday an itinerant preacher is brought in and put up at the inn. “He either preaches to a dozen people, or 30,” says Alexandra, “depending on whether or not they come over from the Boy Scout camp.”
The cemetery, the ultimate New England social register, is populated with simple stone memorials, including Tommy Smart’s, Ansel Smith’s, and a sprinkling of Penobscot Indians—all of them associated in some way with Thoreau’s memory. Mick Fahey is buried here, too, his gravestone inscribed with a verse from Alfred Lord Tennyson: “I am a part of all/ That I have met.” Fahey died in 1985, and Garrett and Alexandra stand for a while over their old friend. She says, “We brought that stone here in a canoe.”
The Lake House porch was made for sitting and that we do, gazing across at Gero Island, feeling guilty for not having to put up tents. Dinner is served in the dining room, under gas lights unavailable in Thoreau’s era and quaint in ours.
On our next to last day we cover fourteen miles on flat water, the wind, usually a constant, banished along with the rain. Scattered across the bright surface of the lake like carefree children, we chatter among ourselves. Sofia reads a Harry Potter story; Alexandra, paddling alone along the shore, sings; Susanna paints the ever-present water, gray, glacier smoothed rocks on an endless beach, sear fallen timber like rough-hewn steps leading to the bright, birch-framed mysteries of the forest.
Thoreau wrote in The Maine Woods: “not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain… far in the recesses of wilderness.” The same can be said for the rest of us.
Our tribe has found in the north woods good spirits, plant and otherwise, and a kind of pride. I have mastered a version of the north woods stroke (”mastery” is a tricky word in Maine), and everyone has shed some doubts about the necessity of modern conveniences. It’s all a kind of playacting, of course—and beneficial because of it. If we can keep alive the once-vital connection between us and the physical world and have fun at the same time, then who can object other than the floggers of jet skis and microwaves?
We are comfortable in our new element, knowing, of course, that Garrett will get the fire going and Alexandra will bake something to celebrate with on our last night together—iced lemon cake, in fact, decorated with yellow loosestrife, red oser dogwood and pearly everlasting, to be digested while watching feathery northern lights climb the vast Maine sky. So no one really cares when wind comes up in the afternoon. We can already see the island where we’ll camp, we can almost smell the wood smoke.
