At one Y intersection, a mirror of three others, I got out to scour the brush for a fallen marker. When I climbed aboard again and pointed straight ahead, I heard, “You found a sign?” No. “How do you figure it then?” In the scrub there’s a skeleton with a bony finger aimed more or less north-northwest — I think it was a wife. “How about a bite of lunch?” Q said.
On an overgrown trail, once an old timber “tote road,” we pulled up and, using the hood for a table, laid out raisins, peanut butter, and crackers. On came the blackflies whose notion of a bite of lunch was Dracula’s, preferring as they did blood to a banana; if they failed to find my neck, a knuckle or eyelid would do. Not once, for reasons unknown, did they nip Q.
As we ate in the car, she said, “Do you think there’s a single square meter here a Euro-American foot has never trod upon?” At the bottom of a lake, perhaps. I held up the atlas showing the forest filled with dashed and dotted lines indicating “unimproved roads” and bulldozed skid trails, old and new. They were all but everywhere. Yet twenty miles west of the Woods lay Quebec and its grid of highways and half a hundred villages named after Christian saints. Across the border was an agricultural economy as different from that of the timberland as a monsieur is from a sir, a baguette from a bagel, Grande Rivière Noire from Chemquasabamticook Stream.
We proceeded on. At the margin of a T juncture, as I started to mark it with my boot, I noticed the damp shoulder already designated with fresh footprints of a black bear; a half mile on, there it was, shambling along, avoiding the dense and infested wet underbrush. The bear heard the crunching gravel in our slow approach and turned to look; if a bear is capable of a shrug, that one shrugged and ambled onward until reaching a narrow gap in the understory where it disappeared. Its nonchalance suggested a degree of wilderness — or maybe its belly was full with the last wanderer stopping to mark his way.
Some miles farther, a moose slipped from the trees, took similar note of us, and trudged off with the same nonchalance as the bear. I assumed they both had encountered just enough loggers to have no curiosity about humans and just enough hunters to know to keep moving, even if only grudgingly. They seemed certain of their territory and not so much fearful as simply undesirous of human company, a response expressed in their insouciant road moseys until a convenient opening allowed them to vanish.
Q had never seen a moose before. She said, “It’s a funny name — moose. It has no sharp edge to it like tiger or catamount.” As we watched it, Q added, “You see a helicopter fly, and you’ve got to say, ‘How could that thing get into the air?’ You see a moose, and you have to say, ‘How could that creature happen?’” I explained that evolutionary process long ago had taken a few infelicitous turns, an easy thing to do in the North Maine Woods. Or it could be, out on the Great Plains a bison had eyes for an elk. “That,” said Q, “explains the humped back and beard, but what about the flat nose?” Did I not mention the sporting platypus?
Creatures came and went: a snapping turtle, spruce grouse, flight of robins, another of evening grosbeaks, a loon, and, yes, a lone raven — plump, shiny, guttural. Finally, we came to a crisscross, an X in the forest no amount of interpreting could match to the map. No wonder I struggled — this wasn’t navigation, it was algebra: if Y is your former location, and T to the left is the wrong way, then what does X equal? A night with the flies.
Patient and trusting, Q waited quietly as my facade of competence vanished faster than blue sky in Maine. Having a twenty-five percent chance of guessing the way to Clayton Lake correctly, I said to angle right, and she did, and after three miles, we found the decision was clearly wrong. Let’s go back and angle left, I said, happy the odds were improving. After all, this was not open sea where the difference between a heading of ninety degrees and ninety-two degrees, after a while, is to arrive in Yokohama instead of Hong Kong.
The direction leftward felt good, almost as good as the wrong one. And it felt even better when we happened upon a man precariously backing a big backhoe off a flatbed truck. I hollered over the engine noise to ask if we were on the road to Clayton Lake, and he was courteous enough to pause, somewhat dangerously, midway in his descent to say what I heard in his heavy Slavic accent as “If you take the next left.” (That clinched it: know, venturing reader, without the word if, accurate directions cannot be given in the Maine Woods.) Q asked, “What did he say?” It sounded like “Next left,” but it might have been something else, maybe a curse for endangering his life. “Wasn’t he smiling?” Q asked. Yes, but for all I know, in Zagreb curses and misdirections are delivered with a grin.
Beyond the left, we did get to Clayton Lake, but then I needed two tries to find the right road out, and from there we rolled on nicely in a direction that felt right until it began to feel wrong. If we were where I feared we were, we might reach the Atlantic but we weren’t going to find the mouth of the Allagash, and it was already late afternoon.
We came to a lumber camp, only the second we’d seen, and Q stopped. I walked about, looked around, knocked on a door, peered into a window, hollered to no response, and found nobody anywhere. Then I heard something from behind a building: a man loading firewood into a pickup. Yes, we were on the right road, but there was a nasty trick of a junction ahead. “You can follow me if you want,” he said, and got into his truck and roared off. Unwilling to crash along as fast as he, we soon lost him in his dust trail. Then came the problem intersection. We paused so the map could have another chance to mock me. With little hope of a solution, I got out again. Signs none, clues zero, nothing. Then, as the dust settled, I saw him in the distance, waving us left. “If we happen onto him tonight,” Q said, “I’m standing him a round.” Let’s make it the next payment on his truck.
The road got worse. For an auto, it was a ten-mile-an-hour veering away from potholes, ruts, and ridges, and bouncing through everything inescapable. If language can represent it, our passage was a spell of humps, bumps, thumps, chunks, clunks, and thunks. But it wasn’t festered with forks and cross points, and so we banged onward in hopeful spirits. Then the Allagash, the beautifully wide Allagash, revealed itself, and we knew its union with the St. John wasn’t far.
About forty years earlier, the people of Maine called for and helped underwrite the establishment of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, thereby giving nature along its shores and tributaries a chance to recover from a century of aggressive logging and dam building. By the time we were in the North Maine Woods, timber-products industries in the region and elsewhere were faltering. Before a recent bankruptcy, the pair of mills in the two Millinockets once employed four-thousand people, a figure that had dropped to four hundred. Companies realized that selling off their timberlands in million-acre deals returned greater profit than cutting the timber. Two years earlier, a U.S. Forest Service report, Forests on the Edge, estimated an area the size of all New England over the next thirty years would likely undergo a “dramatic increase in housing development,” almost all of it in the eastern half of the nation.
As I write these words, anyone sharing in a group pension plan likely has some stake in the wholesale realty divestitures of eastern forests from Maine to Florida, and it is not easy to step away from complicity in the deforestation that divestment encourages. If a portfolio contains a TIMO (Timber Investment Management Organization) or a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust), it is almost certainly taking hefty profits through selling not trees but the lands they grow on to high-bidding companies ready to bulldoze forests for vacation homes, golf resorts, waterslides, tract housing, and the whatnots that go with such things.
By preserving an ecological core and lumbering only on the perimeter, it may be possible to manage large tracts of timber for both “sustainable forestry” and the native diversity underpinning the survival of species, including the human. With a central wilderness to support them, moose and black bear and their associates may be able to withstand the aftereffects of chain saws, but against the asphalt and concrete world of franchise
d chains, they haven’t a chance. A cutover woodland in time can often recover, but a built-over forest is forever lost. For a while, in the North Woods, land ownership, even more than invasive species, will be the issue deciding what future men and moose, realty agents and ravens, will find there.
Near the joining of the Allagash River with the St. John on the border of New Brunswick, we left the forest about sundown and headed to Fort Kent for the night. By then I knew a better way to see the North Maine Woods, at least for now, was from a canoe on a lake or the Allagash River, and that was as it should be: in this era of cushioned travel, wilderness needs to be earned. Our passage through the great Woods had been too easy, but it was still sufficient to reveal the potential loss of something priceless getting priced out of existence by short-term profiteers.
We hadn’t seen much of what Thoreau reports in The Maine Woods, and for a while I thought the place one more I had reached too late. But then I considered travelers a generation or two hence: What would they find there? Would it be disastrously reduced even further? Or was there a possibility they might see a returning forest to surpass what we saw?
When we went into the Woods, there were still many people alive who knew the Allagash country before there was anything like a state park, a game preserve, a protected reserve, or a conservation easement in or adjacent to it. Take those changes away, and what would remain there today? The question of how much more will be allowed to remain — which direction the teeter-totter future will tip — has been passed on down to us, and Thoreau offered a solution: “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”
A couple of months prior to his first journey into upper Maine, he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax. There’s a well-known story, perhaps doctored, that nevertheless makes a point: When his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the jail, he asked, “Henry, why are you here?” And Thoreau is said to have answered, “Why are you not here?”
That evening at supper I told the waitress her crimson blouse and lavender headband helped brighten a night turned again to drizzle, and she said, “I grew up across the river in Canada. Canadians don’t do gaudy — we do genteel.” Pointing out the window toward the terminus of U.S. 1, the other end some two-thousand miles south in Key West, she said, “But I lived for a while just down the road — down in Miami. I guess Florida de-genteeled me.” Q said, “You traded the Maine Woods for South Florida?” And the waitress said, “Not for long.”
After she brought our supper, she asked what we were doing so far from home, and I explained how we’d taken the entire longest day of the year to drive the hundred-and-some miles from Millinocket up through the Allagash to arrive at her table. “Why would you do that?” she said, then, catching herself, “Oh, by accident — you got lost.” Q said, “That’s half right.”
The next morning when I was transcribing notes from my memoranda pad into my logbook, I came upon a notation I’d made in Maine two days earlier when I saw a sign in front of a house where dilapidation was about to yield to collapse: GOD STILL PLANS TO MAKE FARMINGTON HIS NEW J£RUSALEM. Reading my note, I realized I’d been remiss in not stopping to talk with someone who knew the mind of God. I might have learned whether the Divine Plans include a review of the original purpose of the North Maine Woods. If not, it looked like it would be up to us. I think that’s what Raven whispered.
V.
Into the Northwest
Into the Northwest
“May No One Say to Your Shame
All Was Beauty Here Till You Came”
1. Out There Beyond Last Chance
2. The Widow’s Man
3. How Max Oiled the Hinges
4. Querencia
5. What the Chatternag Quarked
6. A Smart Bike
7. Railroad on Stilts
8. Printer’s Pie
“May No One Say to Your Shame All Was Beauty Here Till You Came”
Beautiful as the transparent thin air shows all distant objects, we have never found the great western prairies equal to the flowery descriptions of travelers. They lack the pure streamlet wherein the hunter may assuage his thirst, the delicious copses of dark, leafy trees; and even the thousands of fragrant flowers, which they are poetically described as possessing, are generally of the smaller varieties; and the Indian who roams over them is far from the ideal being — all grace, strength, and nobleness in his savage freedom — that we from these descriptions conceive him. Reader, do not expect to find any of the vast prairies that border the upper Missouri or the Yellowstone rivers, and extend to the Salt Lakes amid the Californian range of the Rocky Mountains, versant pastures ready for flocks and herds, and full of the soft perfume of the violet. No; you will find an immense waste of stony, gravelly, barren soil stretched before you; you will be tormented with thirst, half-eaten up by stinging flies, and lucky will you be if at night you find wood and water enough to supply your fire and make your cup of coffee; and should you meet a band of Indians, you will find them wrapped in old buffalo robes, their bodies filthy and covered with vermin, and by stealing or begging they will obtain from you perhaps more than you can spare from your scanty store of necessaries; and armed with bows and arrows or firearms, they are not unfrequently ready to murder, or at least rob you of all your personal property, including your ammunition, gun, and butcher knife!
—John James Audubon & the Reverend John Bachman,
The Quadrupeds of North America,
1854
Only to the white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was the land infested with wild animals and savage people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessing of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it wild for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was for us the Wild West began.
—Ota K’te (Luther Standing Bear),
Land of the Spotted Eagle,
1933
1
Out There Beyond Last Chance
AS A PHYSIOGRAPHIC REGION, the Great Plains are — by an archaic description — a land of little topographical relief; but for me, as a topography of the mind, they are forever a place of considerable relief. Entering from the east, I come into them relieved of ever-increasing human congestion, and entering from the west, I reach them pleased to leave behind horizons congested by mountain roads impeded with twisted curves. When I see the grand openness lying immensely ahead, my response is: And now for some plain sailing! Crossing the Plains is like reading a nineteenth-century Russian novel: you begin hopefully only to reach the end (if you do) muttering weak huzzahs and vowing once is enough.
So, as always, I looked forward to the Great Plains when Q and I set out a few days before the arrival of autumn. We made a stop in Kansas City to attend the fiftieth reunion of my class of ’57, one event held at Southeast High School where I’d not set foot for half-a-century. It was happenstance during my teenage years that Gus Kubitzki lived only a couple of blocks away and directly in line with the front doors of the school. Having heard on our excursions enough about Gus to feel she had met him somewhere along the way, Q wanted to see his hand-built bungalow in order to have a sense of the man beyond my stories of him. I have waited until this moment to tell you, road-worthy reader, a few facts about him so that he might first emerge in your imagination fleshed out with your colorations. All I want to do now is top those off, perhaps expand and refine them a smidgen for you and let you see that he is not an anonym.
Gus Kubitzki in 195.
To clarify any misperception of his Slavic surname, he described himself — unequivocally — as of Prussian descent. Although born in Ohio, he often tossed at me simple old-world phrases, a bold thing in the ’40s, when the Third Reich was still fresh enough in all our minds for German words to send a chill. He was tall for his time, broad-shouldered, with strong arms and lar
ge hands. In the early years of the twentieth century, he was a pitcher for a semiprofessional baseball team in Cleveland, if I remember correctly. When he was born, home plate was not a pentagon but a simple square, a batter got four strikes, a base on balls counted as a hit, and catchers wore no shin guards.
As we would toss a baseball back and forth, Gus often told me about games he played years earlier, about crazy plays, lucky bounces, a “home run” he hit no farther than three feet but that the catcher pounced on and threw into a cabbage patch beyond right field. Especially, he talked about striking out a pitcher named George who swung a good stick: “He never got the bat off his shoulder on the first strike. Strike two was a big curve the catcher couldn’t even handle. And, on the third pitch, down he went on a slow ball right over the plate.” I knew each throw, and I’d mouth the result along with Gus, but I wasn’t smart enough to pick up why he kept retelling the story, especially since the kid, a pitcher, was eight years younger. But after a while I began to suspect there was something behind the repetitions, a detail I was supposed to discover. One day he called the player Herman, and I said I thought his name was George. “George Herman,” Gus said.
On a warm August afternoon in 1948, as he threw me a few dawdling curves, his Sunday cigar in a holder clenched between his teeth, he once again told the strikeout story but concluded it this time with “Herman died yesterday. It made the front page.” Yeah, yeah, I thought. That evening I pulled a Kansas City Times from the box where we kept them for the annual Boy Scout newspaper drive. On the front page was a small headline, something like: BABE RUTH DIES. Great Scott! I’d been catching curves from an arm that once whiffed George Herman Ruth.