Bragging Cold

by Jim Collins
Yankee Magazine

Forty feet out from shore, Garrett Conover chipped away at a hole in the frozen Allagash. His long spruce pole had a narrow steel blade, which sprayed a shower of ice chips each time it struck the deepening surface. He worked quickly, methodically. In an hour it would be dark, there was a lot to do, and we needed drinking water. When the hole was a foot deep, he paused and said, "That's a pretty good indication of a low-snow winter. Usually we'll hit water here at eight inches." At 16 inches the bottom gave way, and dark water surged to the top of the hole, then settled back. He dipped a tin strainer into the hole and removed the floating ice chunks, then filled two buckets with ice water.

At the top of the bank on the eastern shore, beneath birch and balsam, gear for eight people had been unloaded from seven Cree-style toboggans. Among the gear were sleeping bags, cast-iron pots and pans, food for five days. Two Egyptian-cotton wall tents were already up, each with its own sheet-metal box stove and chimney. Outside one of the tents, Garrett's wife, Alexandra, split small spruce logs with an ax, fuel for the stoves. Her motions, like his, were businesslike, and their business is classic Maine guiding, making people comfortable outdoors in any conditions.

We - six paying guests and two guides - were a half-dozen miles from Canada, just south of the confluence of the Allagash and St. John rivers, remotest Maine. In winter, the river is given back to the wildlife, to the rare snowmobiler, and rarer still, to travelers on foot. Starting up the frozen river on snowshoes on the 20-mile round-trip to Allagash Falls, it had seemed we were alone on a desolate winter highway.

Garrett carried the water toward the "kitchen tent," which glowed from the light of two candles. Night was falling quickly now, the temperature falling below zero. An old spruce groaned somewhere deep in the woods ahead of Garrett. Behind him, river ice, thickening and shifting, boomed softly. He opened the flap of the tent and swung a water bucket on top of the stove; a blast of warm air washed over him.

"It's starting to drop out there," Garrett said. "But it has to get at least down to 20 below before we can call it bragging cold. "Just before dawn, the temperature outside hit 23 below.

We had keen air and the flash of low sun on snow on the second day, even a light wind at our backs. There were drifts a foot deep in the woods, but only an inch or two of wind-packed powder covered the frozen river. No need for snowshoes. We strapped them onto the toboggans and walked easily in our mukluks, pulling 80 pounds behind us as if it were nothing. Spruce and balsam and birch stood out along the shoreline in sharp relief. We covered the five miles comfortably - ideal terrain, ideal traveling weather - reaching our campsite at Big Brook by three in the afternoon.

We unloaded the toboggans and started the routine of cutting wood, and then we heard it: a single coyote cry. Garrett froze. And then another cry, closer, coming down the river. Garrett scrambled down the bank to the brook, and sensing his urgency, we followed him. We inched out to the edge of the point, flat on our bellies, craning to the sound. The coyote came around a bend and trotted toward us, preoccupied, looking back over its shoulder. It stopped and lifted its head and howled, and kept coming. A hundred feet from us it stopped dead and stared straight at us. Hair stood on my arms. Then it bounded away on a diagonal to the opposite shore, passing close to the top of a long finger of open water. We watched it disappear into the brush, saying nothing for a long time. "In all these years of being outdoors," Garrett finally said, "that's the first time I've ever seen a coyote howl."

It was a purple sunset and eight below when we ate dinner: chicken and rice, apple cobbler for dessert. Garrett went out for a minute and came back and announced the temperature had risen three degrees, signal for a change in the weather, possibly snow, despite the stars.

Morning came gray and spitting snow. Today we'd reach Allagash Falls, five miles upriver from Big Brook. We got there just before lunchtime. A spectacular series of ice shelves dropped like green and white candle-wax drippings with water pulsing behind them, pounding into turbulence at the base, which steamed in the cold air. Ledges rimmed the 40-foot wall like a horseshoe canyon, and the new snow had frosted everything white, everywhere. We ate below the ledges, and Canada jays fluttered down from low branches to eat bits of cracker out of our hands.

Just before dark I walked to the edge of the river and stood quietly. The silhouette of a fox loped along the far shore, coyotes howled somewhere in the distance, upstream. The two tents glowed golden in the dark of the woods.

After dinner, Alexandra pulled out ice cream and champagne she'd secretly stashed at the campsite on the way in. We had a bowl of ice cream - in short sleeves, camping outdoors in the middle of January - and raised our glasses to the northern winter, to the region of the elemental, to the Allagash: the immemorial winter road.