Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  Years back, somebody with a lot of time on his hands actually had dozens of people walk through deep forest on a cloudy day to see if they could keep a straight line. Nobody could do it. Some went right and some went left, but they all ended up going more or less in circles. The experimenter said it was due to slight differences in the length of people’s legs. I think maybe it’s that our minds will do darn near anything to turn us off a path into the unknown. Worse yet is that when you finally do break out into the open and it makes sense to pull out the map again, you start morphing those topographic lines into land features that have nothing to do with what they were intended to show and everything to do with the hill or cliff or stream drainage that happens to be right in front of you. And of course you only really need to do that once to be in a hell of a mess, and that’s just what you keep reminding yourself out in the field.

  Even today I wasn’t trailing after Joe Knowles without recognizing the possibility of getting lost. What I didn’t count on was being suffocated. When a moist northeastern woods is only thirty or forty years from the saw like this one, there’s enough sunlight reaching the ground to grow vegetation thick as fur on a beaver’s butt, and full of tangles. By the time I’ve gone a hundred yards, my visibility has dropped to a lousy fifteen feet. About every fourth or fifth step I trip over stumps or downed logs hidden by carpets of club moss and blueberry, several times actually falling, or else find myself mushing up to my ankles through sopping-wet cedar bottoms.

  Skinny young balsam and maple are everywhere, their branches dripping and slapping, drenching me with dew. In other places the laurel is so thick that a greased Chihuahua couldn’t make it through. Todd’s story about Sir Edmund Hillary’s recent visit to the King and Bartlett Camp is taking on new meaning. “Funny thing,” he told me. “Hillary went out for a hike one afternoon. Came back saying this was the damnedest ground he’d ever tried to walk.” It’s the kind of abundance that can seem all-consuming—the Garden of Eden long after God left and fired the gardener.

  I used to imagine all the forests of early America being like this—wild walls so thick and dark it was little wonder the Puritans saw the Devil hiding behind every tree. But it wasn’t that way at all. In most of New England, old trees grew fat and well-spaced from a floor cleaned regularly by burns—some natural, some by native peoples managing the land for certain plants and wildlife. A Robin Hood forest, friendly to travelers on horseback, even those in wagons.

  “Used to be we never cut a tree less than eight inches,” a former lumberjack from Eustis told me, now in his seventies. “And we still had plenty of ‘em big as sugar barrels. Open woods with big spruce and fir, maple, beech. Now the tree harvesters take everything in sight. That’s why the water’s goin’ bad. Pools under the surface in these hard-clay-and-gravel bowls—sits there and gets sour, then the next storm flushes it into the creeks. Farther downstream you go, the more sour it gets.” In addition to sweet water, there are a lot of other riches being lost in the rush to clear-cut the Maine woods. Native Americans are having a tough time even finding birch trees big enough to harvest bark for wigwams and canoes; black-ash trees used in basket-making are getting hard to come by as well, not just from clear-cutting, but from acid rain and other pollution.

  Another hour-and-a-half mile of lurching and stumbling, of swatting the growing mist of flies and mosquitoes, and I finally join the path up Bear Mountain. Just an old logging road, really, abandoned about ten years ago and already overgrown with a loose weave of shoulder-high maples. Much of the route is lined with middle-aged paper birch, each tree with wide ribbons of outer bark that have split and curled away from the trunk. As the sun rises in front of me the beams catch these strips of flagging full on, illuminating the russet-colored inner layer, making it glow, until the route up the mountain seems cradled by the light of a hundred red lanterns. Luminaria hung by the fairy folk to celebrate the cusp of summer.

  Equally fine are the carpets of bunchberry, their whorled leaves scattered across the ground like a beach full of tiny green umbrellas, and the sweet spice of young balsam. Red-eyed vireos flit about looking for bugs, singing all the while, and white-throated sparrows are going on and on with that confounding lyric of theirs, something about “poor Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.” Far off in the trees I can hear the flutey music of a lone wood thrush—the song Thoreau said makes all men young again.

  When I finally gain the shoulder of Bear Mountain I can see Spencer Lake in the distance, sprawling through a hundred wooded ravines. There was a time when sportsmen were willing to travel some twenty miles by motorboat, and another seven by rubber-tired buckboard, just to fish those waters. But today the place is largely ignored. On most mornings much of the surface remains unbroken by boats, a great sweep of calm shimmering in the summer heat. From here I opt for yet another slice of cross-country, this one through a much more mature growth of woods, manage to get lost, or at least confused for a time, and finally arrive at Lost Pond in the early afternoon on a shore thick with fir and striped maple, their feet wrapped in blankets of club moss, twinflower, and velvet-leaf blueberry. A loon sits rock-still in the center of the pond, glassy now, unruffled by even the slightest whisper of wind. Track lines from two different bears run along the shore, each weaving back and forth like the loose steps of children, pulled by curiosity from water’s edge to flower patch to rotted log.

  After supposedly having been lured to this pond by a game trail early in his adventure, Knowles claimed to have killed a black bear along the shore by hitting it over the head with a club and then skinning it, turning the hide into clothing; a picture of him in this skin—looking kind of like Tarzan in the throes of a midlife crisis—ran in newspapers across the country. Later on, when skeptics raised eyebrows about whether such a feat was possible, Knowles was incensed, offered to do it all over again, this time in front of witnesses. And so it was that some unfortunate, rather sleepy-looking black bear was brought in, which Knowles promptly conked over the head and then skinned, using nothing but a sharp piece of slate. The crowd was mighty impressed.

  The problem was that after the show, as the spectators were heading back out of the woods, someone spotted a crude cabin right here along the shore of Lost Pond. The structure appeared to be several months old, but Knowles said he’d never seen it before—a claim hard to swallow given that he supposedly camped here for several weeks. “I knew then he was lying,” said Helon Taylor, seventeen, who later became superintendent of Maine’s Baxter State Park. From there, rumors sprouted like saplings on a clear-cut: con-man Joe, not living the wild life at all, but cozied up in a crude cabin with reporter Michael McKeogh, who was busy concocting a book to make them rich, lighting fires with matches, drinking whiskey and eating cans of beans and stew. To be fair, none of the skeptics ever could explain why, after his adventure, when Knowles was examined by the physical director of Harvard, he showed a marked increase in fitness over when he went in. In fact, said an amazed Dr. Sargent, it was “a hundred and fifty points better than the hardest test taken by the football men.”

  I spend the afternoon shuffling around the fringe of the pond, eyes to the ground, looking for signs of old camps. There are cedar swamps and raspberries and laurel thickets to pick through, and pocket gardens of flag iris to relish, the latter dotting the damp ground with splashes of Prussian blue. Tiny springs walk out of the earth onto narrow paths of moss-covered stone. The woods here have the gentleness of age about them—loose huddles of red spruce and balsam and aspen, well lit, and the ghostly amber-and-ash-colored skin of yellow birch.

  I’ve almost finished circling the pond when, at the southeast corner, fifty or sixty yards from the outlet, I find a number of cedar logs worked a long time ago with ax and saw. Getting down on my knees, I comb the clutter of fallen trees and layers of shrubs, and in time actually find remnants of an old trash pile: a coffee can, old bean cans with baling wire handles, all but rusted through. Could this have been part of Knowles’s trash pile?
I take off my pack, slather on a fresh coat of bug repellent, settle down in the shade of the cedars among the rusted cans.

  On my way west across Maine I took part of an afternoon to visit with eighty-year-old Deb Sylvester, whose family bought the King and Bartlett Camp some fourteen years after Knowles did his wild-man thing. Sitting here now, I think of Deb, the way he used to run around these hills, this same pond, full of the woods and strong as an ox. During my visit we sat in his bachelor-pad house, scattered front to back with his woodcarvings, and in his bedroom, a workbench filled with an array of chisels and glue and sandpaper.

  Deb was thirteen in 1927 when his dad and older brother decided to chuck the grocery business and buy the old King and Bartlett place, long after it had gone from a burgeoning timber camp owned by the Augusta Lumber Company to a hangout for well-to-do hunters and fishermen. “Mostly they was lawyers,” Deb said of the guests. “A few bankers, but mostly lawyers. From New York and Boston and Pennsylvania.” Deb still makes trips to King and Bartlett, and when I asked if those lawyers were much different from the guests he sees today, he nodded his head. “Back then they knew how to settle in and relax. Nearly all of them stayed at least three weeks, some for six. Today ya do something and forget it the next day, it happens that quick. We’re greedy to do things. Wasn’t that way then. Those guys took the time to enjoy.”

  After rummaging around in a bedroom closet for a few minutes, he came back with a box stuffed with old black-and-white photos. One was of a smiling, broad-shouldered, capable-looking woman, his mother, standing in front of the old camp post office. The woman who got up every morning at four o’clock to fire the woodstove and make pans of biscuits and hot bread to go with the pancakes and sausages and eggs for the guides and the help and the guests. Forty or more on any given summer day—so many that the guides had to take their meals in the woodshed. Then photos of Deb at thirteen, grinning into a summer day with a string of fish in his hand—and another one, looking decidedly less enthused, standing beside the huge wooden drum of a spring-loaded mangle used to iron the bed sheets. “I hated that damn thing,” is all he says, and by the way he sets the picture aside, I half wonder if he’s planning to throw it into the trash the minute I leave.

  During cold months young Sylvester kept three beaver trap lines going, each about fifteen miles long; every day he’d walk a different line, and by the end of winter he’d worn out another pair of snowshoes. One time, miles out at twenty below, he broke through beaver-worked ice on snowshoes, barely managed to crawl out and make it back home alive. “It was wild,” Deb told me. “Wild just like I was.” He said that in the summer he carried mail sixteen miles from Eustis into King and Bartlett, more often than not on foot since the only time the buckboards were running was when guests needed in or out. And even when they were running, a fella might just as well walk, given the boulder-strewn, bone-shaking road you had to endure. Truth is that Joe Knowles said the same thing, telling how the sixteen-mile-long ride over the King and Bartlett trail was worse than two months alone in the forest. At one point Deb handed me a picture of a buckboard running over enormous rocks, most of them sticking two or even three feet above the ground, the box tweaked and twisted at the most amazing angles. “I tell ya, you could hear that wagon comin’ an hour before it got there.”

  Come the brutal cold of December the whole family went into camp to cut and haul the wood they’d need for the coming summer, then again in January to saw ice from the lake and put it up in sawdust—five hundred cakes, fifty tons. “A person who lives in nature like that takes the hard knocks. It don’t give you no breaks. You learn to take care of yourself, and that makes you a better person. You learn to look ahead.”

  After a good hour of photos and even a little preachin’ on the side, I decided to ask about Joe Knowles. Deb got up, shuffled over to a bureau in the bedroom and removed two old maps, came back and eased into his frumpy, cushioned chair.

  “Well, there was these two guides,” he said, unfolding the maps. “One was Douglas, from Eustis, and the other was Demmins, out of Flagstaff. They had a camp right near Spencer Lake, called Twin Camps. What they told me was that they had extra clothes waiting there, so after Knowles stripped down and headed off on the trail he ran right over and got the spares. It was all planned ahead of time. There ain’t no man in hell gonna go long without clothes with all those goddamned mosquitoes and black flies.” Deb goes on to say that the guides also left groceries at Twin Camps, so at night Knowles could hike over and pick up his grub for the next couple of days—cans of stew and beans, even bottles of beer. “Two reporters for the Boston Post stayed there at King and Bartlett and wrote stories—stayed right there in a cabin named ‘Granite State’.”

  I have to admit that all along I’ve been holding on to this secret wish that Joe Knowles really did what he claimed to have done…that even if the guy did get into it in the first place because of some beer-soaked bragging in a Boston bar, he still would have figured some way to pull it off. But right now, sitting at this pond thinking about Deb, whose entire life was a spirited dance with the wilds, somehow it matters less. More amazing than what Knowles did or didn’t do was the amazing effect the mere thought of such an adventure had on millions of Americans—husbands and housewives in Scranton and Cleveland and Des Moines eagerly reading headlines about the wild man, sipping dreams of the woods with their morning coffee.

  It was this woodland stage, as much as the man, that led university professors around the country to head to campus in the fall of 1913 with their minds clipped to Maine: Sociologists talked about founding nature colonies; biologists and philosophers spoke of hatching new departments—even entire colleges—devoted to teaching the lessons of the wilderness. Thanks to Knowles, even preachers were suddenly eager to whip heaven out of this outback, declaring that the real lessons of Christianity would be learned not through any man’s sermons, but from outings in the woods. “Behold a sermon two months long for the people of the United States!” cried Herbert Johnson, celebrated pastor of Boston’s Warren Avenue Church. Johnson said he wished those who worshiped gold could understand the underlying spirit of the wilderness. He spoke of how what Knowles did would make men and women across the country go into the woods (he couldn’t have been more right about that), and in the woods they would stop and think. And the more they thought, the longer the flag would wave.

  Some of the fever was a matter of timing. By 1913, the tang of cleverness sometimes associated with the Industrial Age had gone sour. Fully twenty percent of America’s children, most of whom a generation earlier would have been farm kids, were wedged into commerce. As Joe sat on the shore of this pond scratching messages on sheets of birch bark, thousands of ten- and eleven-year-old girls were pulling sixty-two-hour workweeks in the textile mills—“scrawny examples of malnutrition,” one writer called them—earning a miserable seventy-five cents a day. Every night in the hills of Pennsylvania twelve-year-old boys tramped home in the last light, scoured coal dust from their hands and faces from ten hours spent picking impurities out of crushed ore, coughed it up at the dinner table between bites of potatoes and greens. When Senator William Borah of Idaho introduced a bill to improve the lives of kids in the workplace, he asked the government to do for children what it had done some time ago for calves and pigs.

  By the time Joe disappeared into these woods, real wages had actually dropped from what they were fifteen years earlier; for a lot of people holidays like Christmas and New Year’s came wrapped in resentment, since they meant no work and no pay. Industries worked their people to a frenzy for nine months of the year, then shut down for the remaining months, leaving everyone unemployed. More than a third of all industrial workers suffered from tuberculosis, and much of that was blamed on poor living conditions. The most detailed study of the times said that over ten million Americans—nearly fifteen percent of the population—were so poor they couldn’t afford the food and clothing necessary to keep a body in sound condition.

/>   Little wonder that stripping naked and heading off into the woods seemed like a good idea.

  I’m back at the kitchen at a quarter to six. Linda is tossing seasonings across sheets of pork chops for tonight’s dinner, while Lou Ann slides pans of bread in and out of the ovens. Before long smells like holidays are drifting through the screens, pulling both guides and guests through the side door to swoon and ask after dinner. To those they know and like the women feign a shortage of patience, fretting at them, treating them like little boys who need lids screwed on. “If you don’t get out of my kitchen you can just go hungry,” Linda tells Roger, the CEO from New York, who’s standing in the corner with Glen, hands in pockets, grinning at the sudden attention. Glen hurries over for a cup of coffee and then he and Roger head to the back room, while Lou Ann pushes past me and out the door for a quick cigarette.

  “Fred told me he’d give me a trip to Puerto Rico if I quit smoking,” she tells me on her way out. “To hell with that. If I want to go to Puerto Rico, I’ll just go.” About then, Todd walks by within easy earshot, an investment banker from Boston at his side; Lou Ann shrugs at the two of them, flashes a guilty smile. “Me and my mouth,” she whispers, and then hurries off behind the lodge to light up.

  “Okay. What did I do wrong?” Roger is saying to Glen as I make my way to the back room. He’s referring to his having been skunked at fishing. From the tone of his voice, he’s not upset, merely curious, as if he were choosing a conversation to go with his Scotch.