Glen thinks for a minute, considers the student. “Well, you know, being a big fish is kind of like being a kid in the projects. You survive by being cautious. Suspicious. Not trusting things you don’t know. You find safe places, comfortable places, and that’s where you spend your day. Fish don’t come out for every stranger with candy in his pocket.” This he follows up with a brief discussion of techniques, strategies they’ll use tomorrow to increase the odds of coaxing out the big ones.
Roger just smiles. I get the feeling Glen is so important to Roger’s experience that he’d probably follow him were Glen to go work at some other camp, the way the rest of us might follow a doctor to a different clinic in another town. It’s not just that Glen’s been out in the woods a lot; in Maine, such people are as common as river rocks. What’s striking is how he’s managed to hold on to whatever note of amazement nature slipped into his pocket when he was just a kid. Glen’s clients find themselves enchanted because he’s enchanted. On any given summer day you’d stand a decent chance of stumbling across Glen and some stockbroker on their knees in the pines, Glen pulling stories from a pile of bear shit steaming in the woods.
“Glen’s like a curator in an art museum,” Roger says. “He’s not there to tell you to like or dislike the paintings. He just makes it easier for you to look.”
Glen flashes a small grin, doesn’t say anything. Maybe he’s trying to imagine himself as curator of an art collection. In truth, the two men are like people from different countries, communicating with one another by drawing pictures on the backs of matchbooks. But they’ll come back together in these same woods next year, and probably the year after that. And if not here, then somewhere else.
The morning begins with a leaky tire that can’t be fixed. When the owner of the service station in Stratton finds he doesn’t have the right size, he gives me his truck to go looking for one. Another shop down the highway doesn’t have anything in my size either, though they do offer me some good advice about what the fish are biting on in Flagstaff Lake. Thirty minutes later I rumble back to the garage empty-handed, ask Jerry to put on the spare, head next door for a bite of breakfast.
The Stratton Diner on the morning of the fifth of July is like a slow day at the cemetery. The help looks so bedraggled and worn-down that out of sympathy I end up ordering things that don’t take much work to prepare: a couple of fried eggs, cooked however, and a piece of ham. Phyllis serves up a mug of coffee so strong a little dog couldn’t make a track in it, then sits back down with a friend in front of The Price is Right. The other waitress, Gena, slumps on a bar stool, elbows on a glass display case, a cigarette hanging from her fingers. She smokes it by pitching her whole body forward, taking a drag, and then rocking back again, like one of those plastic bobbing birds that tips its head in and out of a glass of water. Behind her is an old sign, yellowed and tattered at the edges: “This isn’t Burger King. You’ll do it my way.”
Though this is the morning after the busiest weekend of the year, the gifts in the glass case don’t seem to have been moving very well. The shelves are brimming over with potholders with the shape of Maine sewn into them, and tiny pillows, not six inches across, with embroiderings of moose. Someone has cut pictures of fish from outdoor magazines, shellacked them onto slabs of pine, and turned them into clocks. There are Maine mugs, pen sets, and birch-log candle holders. In the corner of the case is a big pile of just one book, self-published by a local author, titled Meditations of a Christian Martial Artist.
About the time my breakfast arrives, a round, balding guy in his late forties wearing a plaid shirt drops by for a cup of coffee. Phyllis and her friend manage a sluggish greeting, while on The Price is Right, Johnny Gilbert yells at someone to “Come on down!” The man tries to kid with them for a minute or two, gets nowhere, ends up sitting down at the table next to mine. We start talking, and I find out that he too has been both a logger and a guide, though now his business is repairing furnaces. “Can’t circle a tree anymore without finding a guide,” he says, clasping his cup with enormous hands, as if trying to warm up after that cold shoulder from the women at the counter. “It’s a good way to keep from havin’ to leave the woods.” The more we talk, the more it seems clear that this guy, like all the others I’ve met, isn’t just partial to any old patch of New England woods. It’s the Maine woods that matter. The forest across the border in New Hampshire, no matter how much it may look the same, just isn’t.
I finish my last bite of toast, agree to one last cup of coffee, then head outside to try a phone call to Garrett and Alexandra Conover. The Conovers own a guiding business two hours to the east, and their names have come up several times as people I should talk to if I’m serious about woods. Thankfully they’re between trips, and we agree to meet at their home later this afternoon. When I get back to the table, my breakfast partner turns to me, a thoughtful look on his face.
“You know what you were sayin’ before, how everyone you meet seems real loyal to Maine? Reminds me of a story. This fellow comes up from Massachusetts to marry a Maine gal. Kind of gets treated a bit different—folks are cautious about him. Things don’t get much better for his kids; people don’t consider ‘em full-blood Maine either. Well, the day comes his granddaughter is born, so this fellow heads right down to the store, where all the boys are gathered ‘round, and springs the news. ‘At least my granddaughter will get treated like a native,’ he says. This one boy just shakes his head. ‘Reckon just ‘cause the cat has her kittens in the stove, don’t make ‘em biscuits’.”
Chapter Three
SEVERAL MILES EAST OF EUSTIS the road brushes against a wild-looking mix of fir, birch, and maple. The woods are spreading, fattening, flowing down the face of every hill, overhanging ponds and streams, nuzzling the edges of farms and fields. In the ditches dozens of yellow tiger swallowtails rise and fall from the faces of flowers, unsure whether to eat or dance. Pure blue highway now, all twist and jitterbug. Flycatchers throw off loud, electric buzzes from the trees, as if the woods were shorting out under the weight of the July sun, and red-eyed vireos dash back and forth across the cracks in the road. Meadows are crowded with mats of bindweed and yarrow, and beyond them, along the edges of the woodlands, stream long, colorful runs of barberry, foamflower, and lily-of-the-valley.
Not just plants, in the scheme of things long past, but medicinals too. Crushed yarrow leaves to stem bleeding in the shops of the carpenters and blacksmiths and shipbuilders, lily-of-the-valley to strengthen the heart. Those in need of a laxative never had to look farther than a spoonful of dried bindweed root, and any Christian who’d been out carousing on Saturday night could rid himself of his bloodshot eyes in time for Sunday services with a quick wash of barberry water. (Berberine, the active ingredient in barberry, is still the main ingredient used to get the red out.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about where I should go, trying along quiet stretches of roadway to sort out exactly which woods to waltz with in the weeks to come. My first notion—and I swear there was a time I didn’t think this way—was to weave the trip around the so-called last of the best places: the biggest sweeps of forest, the wildest, the oldest. Lousy idea. Not that there isn’t a whack-on-the-side-of-the-head value to visiting the largest of what remains of our wildlands. But the celebrity status of such places can be a bit distracting, especially when all you really want is a certain old brand of quiet—smell the smells, visit with a few locals, head out for walks on land where it’s easy to lose the path.
I decide that when I finish my visit with the Conovers the best thing might be simply to make for the south in a loose drift, then slowly wend north again, docking at that handful of places I remember from a long, long time ago, when I was just a kid: the hills of Appalachia. That patchwork of woods and thickets near my old hometown, in the corny flats of Indiana. Those dark, sweet runs of pine in the far north. The places that know me. The places I’m pretty sure will welcome me back.
Beyond the towns the houses wear a set
tled, comfortable look. Harsh winters have scoured coats of paint into pale versions of the originals—reds have gone to rose, navy to powder-blue. Most rest beside well-tended gardens, and owners with more than a pantryfull of produce offer it to passersby on tables made of planks and sawhorses. I lose count of the yards of peas and flowers, of strawberries, beans, and beet greens. Along with things edible there’re tables of crafts—lots and lots of them. Some, including most everything having to do with fishing, are well down the road to tacky. But a surprising number are quite beautiful—quilts, bird carvings, pottery—giving another nod to the reputation Maine residents have long earned for creativity, for engineering a kind of backwoods Bohemia. It’s obvious, said one historian, that in Maine there’s an unmistakable impulse to create.
By the middle 1800s the state’s remote forest towns were overflowing with art: paintings, songs and plays, poems and rhymes and verse. Even the itinerant preachers who rambled through Maine’s backwoods seemed fond of serving up their sermons in rhyme. One clergyman rode into the town of Israel to announce the death of a prominent local woman, offering the news to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”
The Lord God took his rod
–and shook it over Goshen;
And poor Miss Lowe was called to go,
–and death it was her po’tion.
Far from being offended, the congregation nearly erupted into a jig.
“Why, there’s men in these woods that could write po’try as good as Longfellow and Emerson,” said one old lumberman in 1927. “If only they was booked up enough.” (It wasn’t unusual for people who were booked up enough to dive headfirst into the outback of Maine, surface with a strain or two of clever verse, polish it up and serve it to the rest of the country. Carl Sandburg’s acclaimed poem, “The Buffalo Skinners,” for one, was an adaptation of an old song written and sung by Maine lumbermen.)
Verse was especially easy to come by around the logging camps. It was functional art at its best, as often as not used to describe the working conditions offered by a given timber company. All it took was a couple of backwoods bards passing around ditties about how crappy some camp boss treated his men—or even worse, how bad the food was—and the next season that company would find itself having a heck of a time finding good workers.
The sages of the late 1700s had predicted exactly such artistic flurries in the country as a whole, saying how Americans would rise to new heights of creativity simply by virtue of having rubbed elbows with the woods. Some historians say these predictions were nothing more than part of an inferiority complex—that we looked across the Atlantic at the accomplished cultures of Europe and Great Britain, felt desperate to find something of our own to be proud of, ended up settling for woods, mountains, and rivers because that was all we had. But that ignores the fact that pride in nature had been building for a hundred years. Americans were never so thickheaded not to realize that without their forests they never could have dreamed of becoming a country. From the earliest Colonial times our commerce rested almost entirely on wood: lumber for the sugar works of the West Indies, white-oak barrel staves to Madeira and the Canary Islands, pitch, tar, masts, shingles, and clapboard to England, and entire ships to Spain and Portugal. New Englanders used to recline around fireplaces so big it took an ox to drag in the logs (the average house burned twenty to sixty cords of wood a year), and still had plenty of clear, choice wood left over for fences and wagons, fish traps and mill wheels, tools, houses, churches, colleges.
It was the great sweeps of forest, cut and smoldered into charcoal, that gave us the ironworks needed to turn out cannon and rifles in the Revolutionary War. And speaking of the war, one of the first real skirmishes of the revolution took place off the coast of Maine, when the townspeople of Machias prevented a British ship from commandeering a shipment of pine wood; chased it down, captured it, decorated it with evergreens and renamed it Liberty. When the time came for a young America to think in terms of identity, of heritage, we almost always saw ourselves in terms of trees—plastering them across our state flags, stamping them into our coins, sewing them as panels on the quilts we pulled over us to keep warm at night. Trees as the raw music that would become myth, legend, religion.
At a little market near Guilford I stop to buy something for Garrett and Alexandra, end up with a bag stuffed full of fruit, as if their having spent the summer in canoes might have left them risking scurvy. Garrett’s directions are the first I’ve received anywhere in Maine that actually work—no doubt a good sign for a guide. With thirty minutes to spare I park the van down the road from their house, near the dozing village of Willimantic, and wander down to the banks of Big Wilson Stream. It’s a wonderful river, split here and there by alder-covered islands, stained to the color of tea by tannic acids, dropping toward Sebec Lake fast enough to allow a person to hum along with the rollers, slow enough for quiet pools to have formed behind every slab of granite. Hugging the rocks are plush cushions of jade-colored moss, and tucked among these, scaly tufts of liverwort—that mysterious plant that’s not quite moss and not quite lichen, that in fact isn’t tied to any known ancient plant group at all. When not laced with the scent of water, the air runs thick with balsam; I draw it in, recalling old tales of slipping balsam pillows under the heads of children to spare them bad dreams.
Despite having just come off a hectic trip, the Conovers look remarkably relaxed. It doesn’t take ten minutes of talking to think of them as people of above-average balance, the kind who by either skill or environment manage to be composed in the midst of all sorts of craziness.
We meet at their combination office and workshop, a beautiful place finely crafted out of pine, tucked into the trees like it sneaked there in the middle of the night. Soon after I arrive, though, they lead me down several hundred yards of dirt path through the balsam and birch and hemlock, past clintonia and bracken and Indian cucumber, to their home, summer and winter—a twelve-by-twenty-four-foot wall tent on the bank of Big Wilson Stream. Against the far wall of the tent are curtained shelves filled with rodent-proof containers of dry foodstuffs, a propane burner, and an icebox. Farther down is a woodstove, and beyond that, a bed draped with mosquito netting, shut off from the rest of the tent by a sheet of canvas. Oil lamps are strategically placed, and books abound—contemporary works of fiction, nature essays, and accounts of explorations—a few here beside us on the kitchen table, others piled on the counter and beside the bed. We eat a lunch of bread and fruit and cheese, drink filtered river water. The sun is falling full on the canvas, causing the entire inside of the tent to glow with the colors of a candle flame; between conversation we listen to the sound of the river, always that river, singing through the walls.
“We’d been going up there for years,” Alexandra is saying, continuing a story she started earlier about a two-month snowshoe trip she and Garrett made over some three hundred and fifty miles of untracked tundra in northern Labrador, through the historic homelands of the Nascapi Indians, to Ungava Bay. “We’d been going up a month at a time, trying to learn everything we could from the native people. Of course at first they didn’t trust us. But we were patient. We knew enough not to come right out and ask for teachers. To the Nascapi, that trip we did to Ungava Bay was as important as all the time we spent struggling with their language. They saw it as a willingness to learn the language of the earth, their homelands. When we got back, the people came up and felt our arms and ribs and laughed like hell because we were so skinny. But we were alive, and they’d been sure we were going to die.”
When people first told me about Garrett and Alexandra, what intrigued me wasn’t so much their love for the out-of-doors, but their passion for traditionalism. Besides having learned from the Nascapi of Labrador, for some twenty years they’ve been devoted students of the last of the old-time Maine guides. What started as fascination has swelled into philosophy, a kind of creed that washes their days with a precious, enviable sense of place. Learned people, slipping gently toward middle-age
in the shade of the Maine woods, tending their souls by flinging open windows into the past.
Both say that as teenagers, they were forever peeling back the layers of things—fields and woodlots and the backyards behind their homes in southern New England—trying to imagine what those places must have been like fifty or a hundred years earlier. Just the kind of soulful rummaging that in time would lead them to see the whole world as a work in progress. What most people think of as inanimate they see as having a life of its own. “Some people think we use wood-and-canvas canoes for environmental reasons,” says Alexandra, “because we think that plastic is bad. It’s not about that. We use them because they’re like my grandfather’s ax that’s had three different heads and four different handles, yet it’s still my grandfather’s ax. These canoes, you can replace every piece, every inch of them. You can love them, have a relationship with them. They glow. They talk. And when you’re done, you can pass them on to another generation.
“An old-timer comes up to me and says, ‘Nice wooden paddle, but I’ll show you one that will work a lot better, and I’ll tell you why.’ And what he’s telling me is what Nick Ronco, a Penobscot Indian, told him, and what Nick Ronco was told by his parents. So what I’m getting is an age-old story about why this paddle works—not everywhere, but here in Maine, in this place, in these waters. There’s a sense of humanity in that approach. It’s positive. It’s not against—it’s for.”
A pair of nuthatches flit past the door of the tent. A red squirrel pokes its head in, looks around, turns and leaves. We pour more hot water, sip another round of tea, listen to the chatter of Big Wilson Stream slapping against the rocks. Alexandra is right, of course. What could be more suitable than a tool, designed and refined over thousands of years, meant solely for use in one region? There’s so much common sense in it, and yet at the same time it goes so against our tendency, our obsession, to homogenize. I have to admit that such thoughts have seldom occurred to me, or for that matter, to most other people I’ve traveled with into the wilds.
Through the Woods Page 4
