As we rolled on northward, the territory thinned of humanity and its contemporary disfigurements. At the old mill towns of Millinocket and East Millinocket, the highways at last shied away from the northwest corner, the so-called Unorganized Territory, the North Maine Woods still largely owned by timber companies feeding paper mills, although ownership was changing (about that I’ll say more shortly). From Route 11 on the east and south, the Woods lay unintruded upon except by privately owned logging roads and some fish and hunting camps. With the exception of Baxter State Park, for a hundred miles west and more than that north, there was no entry without permission of the corporations calling themselves the North Maine Woods, Inc., as though they were the forest itself. (I’ll use that term to refer to trees, not companies.) In area, imagine New Hampshire without pavement and population. An expanse that size in the Far West would draw scarce attention to private enterprises controlling open access to it, but in New England, a million square-miles is a significant piece of realty to lie beyond unrestricted public purview.
Major paved highways of Maine.
To enter that domain, you approach a “checkpoint,” answer a few questions, pay a fee, agree (readily) to give timber trucks right-of-way, and express hope of finding your course over continually changing gravel roads and one-lane bridges, where signposts are as rare as those on the Road to Hell, and the way is not paved with even so much as a good intention.
That is not a complaint. I am generally comfortable with limiting the sprawl of exurbia by keeping certain areas tucked away so at least a little effort and commitment are necessary to enter. Because there is hardly a place in America I would not go to see at least once (well, I did skip that so-called museum of ceramic figurines of angels and another one “proving” the concurrent existence of Homo sapiens and brontosauruses), a partially forbidden territory carries something of an added allure of trespass.
[DIGRESSION ALERT: A man in North Dakota, an Assiniboin, told me years ago when I asked if I could cross a fence to take a picture, “Every white or black man and woman in this country lives in trespass. How could you make any difference?” I take his point, but I still honor fences except on occasion when the deed holder is an absentee corporation whose board of directors couldn’t distinguish “their” north forty in west Texas from a national park in Oregon. As the man explained, “Five hundred generations of footprints and burials give possession — not some goddamn piece of paper in a courthouse signed ninety years ago.”]
For three decades I’d wanted to enter the Unorganized Territory, sometimes simply called, after the river running through its heart, “the Allagash.” Reading Thoreau’s The Maine Woods intensified my wish to see it, and the urge gained strength from my oldest highway atlas depicting the territory and labeling the unimproved roads there with five come-hither words: PRIVATE RD — OPEN TO PUBLIC. Weeks previous, when I mentioned to Q the time had come at last to head out for the Maine Woods, she who at the drop of a suggestion will go anywhere (including, candor compels me to say, an “Elvis Lives!” exhibit) was mentally packed in less time than it takes to read a Thoreau sentence.
Counter to my usual approach of just wandering into a place without advisement from others, I thought — because of Q’s presence — getting local counsel before entering the Woods a sound idea. In Millinocket, in the shadow of Mount Katahdin, in a downpour, I began asking questions in offices, cafés, the library, and, later, even the town tavern, one of those places commonly known for misrepresentation, misinterpretation, misinformation, misguidance, misconception, misdirection, misestimation, misunderstanding, and misbegotten notions leading to misadventures, mishaps, mistakes, misfortunes, and (worst of all should Q overhear any of it) misgivings. But, outside of legislative chambers, where else can one hear such a pile of dreck and drivel, dregs and dross, duff and dung, all for the price of a pint?
In everything I learned during the day, only one discovery surprised me: I found nobody who had ever done what I proposed doing — looping along on logging roads through the forest to gain a real sense of it — south to north, east to west. To make such an irregular ambit without long backtrackings would require slipping into Quebec and out again to reenter the Allagash and end up eventually along the St. John River at the Canadian border. The route, marked on my map, looked something like a grotesquely misshapen S.
Even though informants could not account for its name, they all had traveled the Golden Road, a kind of southern boundary and the last stretch of pavement for many miles north, east, or west. If natives went into the Woods at all, it was to fish or hunt, perhaps even to canoe, although canoes and kayaks were mostly for outsiders. But just to “wander around up in there” — that was pointless if not wacky, a view expressed most concisely by a fellow to whom comb, razor, and soap apparently were anathema: “First question,” he said. “Why?” I wanted to respond, Quoz, man, quoz! but with my sanity already at issue, an introduction of arcane vocabulary into the conversation could not possibly help.
Of more use was the man who said, “Just south to north — if you don’t make any wrong turns — that’s a hundred-sixty miles. I’ve been up in there a couple of dozen times, and I’ve gotten lost three times that many times and ran out of gas twice. One damn wrong turn late in the day, and you’ll spend the night with bears licking your hood and blackflies sucking your blood. A couple of wrong turns down to a dead end, and you’ll be out of gas.” He let that sink in, then tried to get helpful. “Got a CB?” No. “How about GPS?” Just a compass. “Shit,” he said. “And you’re taking the blonde?” Q heard that one. “I’m not the blonde,” she said. “I’m the mechanic!” (Her riposte was more warranted than accurate.)
The range of opinions from his view went on down to a couple of culinary references by a woman quoting her husband: “He says it’s a piece of cake. Easy as pie — if you can tolerate getting lost now and then.” As I went out the door, she called out cheerfully, “You be sure now to take water and food. And extra tires.” Her last words were more ominous: “Let us know if you make it!” My thought was, How easy can pie be if it requires extra tires?
Later, in the Blue Ox Saloon, a man used his wetted finger to draw maps on the bar top. Watching his directions evaporate, I realized I’d neglected to ask the most fundamental question: could an ordinary, low-clearance automobile handle the roads? “Sure,” he said, “if you go slow.” All the advice had in it somewhere a damn if. As he calculated, he apparently noticed Q’s necklace, a small brass compass I’d given her and had engraved with, I am your guide. Turning back to me, he said, “They don’t usually pull more than a couple of skeletons a year out of the Allagash, and only a few of them are wearing a compass.” She didn’t hear him, although moments later she said, “You know, going down the Allagash River has an advantage.” Which is? “It flows only out.”
With that, I proposed a toast to Dr. Benjamin Ball. “Who’s he?” she asked. A Boston physician. In 1855 he decided to climb Mount Washington. After he arrived and saw the thing, he decided to borrow a pair of boots, a warm cap, and an umbrella, and in late October, Doc started up. Alone. The boots were too big for him. “Did he make it?” No. “He died?” No. “So what happened?” Three days later a search party found him and helped him down the mountain. “And?” He spent the next three months in recovery. She said, “Did you bring an umbrella?”
10
What Raven Whispered
AS SOUTHERN FLORIDA IS THE SOUTH only by proximity, so northern Maine is New England, lacking as it does village greens, old liberal-arts colleges, Paul Revere bells hanging in belfries, preserved homes of honored poets, and tended graves of eighteenth-century statesmen. It’s a harder, tougher place, with a pedigree not of letters and quaintness but of timber mills and potato barns, where the past looks not so much historic as just beat-up. The true proximity shaping it is both more primitive and primeval, and lies northward, in the opposite direction, toward the boreal forest and chains of lakes and ponds, bogs and fens, t
hat mark the courses of glaciation after glaciation having their way with the terrain and shaping everything in their paths.
Following the flows of linked streams and lakes — called quick water and dead water — a dedicated canoeist could paddle from near the center of the state to the Canadian border almost two-hundred aqueous miles north over a route of portages short and somewhat longer to reach the St. John River. At the heart of the Woods is the Allagash, four decades ago designated a Wilderness Waterway, perhaps an accurate description by current standards, but certainly not in terms Thoreau would accept. If wilderness means untrampled by humans other than those once living with stone tools, then the so-called Unorganized Territory may no longer quite match the description Thoreau wrote in 1846 after his initial visit there:
What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. It is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere wet and miry. The aspect of the country indeed is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and the lake prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree. . . . These are not the artificial forests of an English king — a royal preserve merely. Here prevail no forest laws, but those of nature. The aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested.
On the first morning of summer, Q and I set out early to have every minute of extra light the planet could collect even in that land of long summer days. The Maine glooms obscured sunrise, but by the time we neared the Golden Road, the dreariness lifted to reveal clouds in such variety they created a veritable primer of nephology. Staring skyward, the navigator (he) missed a turn, and we had to backtrack, the very thing I conjectured would be the biggest hindrance to maintaining a sensible course through the Woods. Q: “Is one tank enough to do the miles twice?” Probably not.
We were outfitted with a pair of compasses, the two most-detailed maps I could find, and The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer; maybe I also should count my old hubris of almost always being able to match routes on paper with those on pavement. Entry to the Golden Road was marked by a wordy sign perhaps meant to discourage the timid; in my interpretation it boiled down to this:
THESE LOGGING ROADS ARE FOR MOVING LOGS,
NOT YOU, SO KEEP THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY
OF TIMBER TRUCKS AND REMEMBER
THERE IS NOTHING IN HERE YOU CAN BUY.
Fair enough.
The initial thirty-five miles were on two-lane asphalt through unexceptional woodlands, and for the first ten minutes we followed a large trash-truck I would have preferred seeing — if at all — going out of the Woods. The route was an alley of mixed forest, the trees younger than I, a place of regrowth without a tincture of wilderness, and fully unlike Thoreau’s description — including his sentence about the nondispossession of “the aborigines.”
We crossed a little bridge over the West Branch of the Penobscot River at a stretch called the Abol Deadwater, and there, at last, the timberland opened: five miles east rose Katahdin, its south slope set into splendid relief by the low angle of the morning sun, and on its north a jam-up of clouds evaporated while trying to find a way around the mountain. The customary mantle of weather around Katahdin had always before prevented me from seeing much of it. We stopped and walked to the stream to get an even better view, and there a couple dozen cliff swallows flittered and chittered about a puddle as they beaked up goo for their mud-jug nests. They gathered so fearlessly around us, I felt like St. Francis, and my hopes rose for more wilderness where nature might see humans as just another creature: stand still, hold out an arm till Raven flies to your perch and whispers secrets of the earth.
Near the top of the broad arc of the Golden Road, we left it and the pavement at Big Eddy just below Ripogenus Lake, from there to head northward on what locals call “dirt” roads but which are in fact graveled. A few miles beyond was the Telos checkpoint formally admitting us into the North Maine Woods. I went to the small office to pay sixteen dollars for passage. At about a dime a mile, it would be a bargain of ruts and chuckholes, loose rock, and muddy sloughs or dust clouds (depending on whether it had rained on a spot an hour earlier or the night before). Inside, I opened my marked map to show the gatekeeper our proposed route. She glanced at it and said, “That’s not possible. Not anymore.” Why not? “They say a couple of the Nine-Eleven terrorists entered the country through one of those checkpoints on the Canadian border, so all the private-road crossings are closed now. You can’t hook over into Quebec on one road and come back into the NMW on another. You can go up to the border, but then you’ll have to turn around and come back the way you came.”
Five sentences, and there went my itinerary. I stepped outside to mutter over to a picnic table where I spread out the maps, weighted them with rocks, and began to refigure. Q said, “Why didn’t anybody tell us yesterday those border checkpoints have been shut down?” Because they never use them. They go into the Woods to hunt or fish, not to pass through. If they want to go to Fort Kent, they take Route 11. Only cabbageheads tour on the logging roads.
As I calculated a different route northward to get us into as much territory as possible without retracing miles of it, I came up with a course generally following the Allagash River, but I couldn’t shake my disappointment, at least not until the breeze slackened enough to let blackflies find me. I continued figuring, slapping, measuring, slapping, marking, slapping, cursing, slapping, slapping, and finally going back into the cramped office. If those little botherations can drive a half-ton of moose to near frenzy, why should a man feel unmanly by retreating behind screen windows? “Got to you, did they?” the gatekeeper said. “Now you’ll scratch for a week.”
I pointed to my redrawn route through the heart of the Woods to the mouth of the Allagash. What do you think? I asked. She looked at it and said, “I’ve never been up that far, but I can tell you that even we get lost in there. The roads change all the time, or some of them do anyway. I’d say you’re in for a little adventure.”
She called over a log hauler who had just stopped by. He looked at the map and said nothing. What do you think? I asked. “About what?” Let me ask it this way, are the roads marked? “Some of the main ones got names.” But are there signs on the roads? “I seen a few. They got signs to the fish camps up.” What about closed bridges? “Yeah.” The hauler, a crackerjack of taciturnity, was the kind of chap you hope is seated next to you on a transcontinental night-flight. I pointed out the window. Can that car make it? “If you don’t get on the wrong road.” Ah, that little conditional again.
It was time to call up my favorite Quaker apothegm: proceed as the way opens. Off we went, slowly, giving wide berth to log trucks — though few — and their trail of airborne rocks. After puzzling through a couple of crossroads, Q said, “What do you think? Onward?” It’s trickier than I’d imagined, I said, but Daniel Boone and I have never been lost, although — as he admitted — we’ve been once or twice confused for a couple of weeks. All I need to do is keep us from going too far west or east and hitting a dead end. “Won’t the compasses keep us straight?”
The problem was this: some northering roads had portions running east or west, and in one place, even south. When a change of direction happened at a junction, the correct road might head off for a few miles in the wrong direction and the wrong road in the correct direction. I had new comprehension of what the first cross-country automobilists faced in the days before highways and route markers.
Q was at the wheel and I at the chart table of my lap holding the two maps, both of which I quickly put aside because they left the roads unlabeled. But The Maine Atlas did show some names, and when an intersection actually had a sign, I was able to fix our position. At several crossings or forks, I hopped out to hunt
in the brush for an overgrown or knocked-down marker, one of which I picked up to match the post to its broken base to see which direction it formerly pointed. Those hunts could last until the blackflies found me.
Except from the little bridges, trees blocked long views, although occasionally I could look fifty or sixty feet into the trees to see more trees, many of which I assumed were only a screen masking a clear-cut a few yards on beyond. It was as if we moved in a tunnel cut through heavy fog. (Whoever first uttered that old platitude “Can’t see the forest for the trees” may have been then in the Maine Woods.) Yet the forest I saw wasn’t the ancient and mossy giants of spruce and fir I had hoped for; rather, it was deciduous trees mixed with scrawny conifers and much scrub. The lack of sight lines, of course, is part of the experience of the Maine Woods, and our moving half blindly did give a sense of remoteness, even if more imagined than actual. When we came upon an occasional unscreened clear-cut, it was almost possible to be grateful for the longer — if unnatural — view it allowed of the roll in the landscape.
In a way, navigation was easy — that is, useless — because other than turning back, there was only one direction to go until we came to a junction where finding the way was a matter of reading a text of three letters, a little alphabet of decisions: an X, a Y, a T. After an hour, it became clear many crossings differed one from the other as does dawn from daybreak, your right thumb from your left. At nondescript intersections, I would hop out to drag a heel into the gravel. And, amazingly, at one place, I discovered my mark ten miles farther had somehow migrated to the opposite side. I said, How could this crossroad be Cyr Road if we’re on Cyr Road which, according to the map, we have to be? Q: “Maybe a prankster moved the sign.” (It must be said here, should you ever visit the North Maine Woods and come upon a log hauler who welcomes your presence, who will slow down to give directions, you have met a Samaritan indeed. I would not want it otherwise: part of my reason for going in was to see whether — relying little on human assistance — I could find a course all the way through and out again with mind and marriage still intact.)