Call of the Loon

by James Conaway
National Geographic Traveller

We are paddling on wind-hazed water, in another century. Spruce, jack pine, and balsam clasp the shore of Lobster Lake, an unbroken expanse of green under a cloud-streaked sky that is both broad and intimate. Floating below us, the inverted reflection of Spencer Mountain is scored by the long, straight wakes of two cruising loons.

Maine, for me, has always been synonymous with the outdoors and the ramblings of Henry David Thoreau, author of the book Walden, in which he asserted, in a time before boom boxes and squealing electronic devices, that people "lead lives of quiet desperation." But it was his writings in another book, The Maine Woods, that captured a different place and different sentiments about the wild north country that made me want to see a moose knee-deep in a tea-colored river and discover other remnants of a landscape that profoundly moved this, the most famous of American nature writers.

A few hours earlier, I'd stood in a barn 80 miles to the south in Willimantic, Maine, with a handful of other pilgrims. "There aren't too many 'don'ts,'" trip leader Garrett Conover was telling us. "Don't use the ax. Don't talk to us during dinner prep, and don't relieve yourselves less than two see-fars from the water." A see-far is the distance you can see into the woods while standing on the bank.

Garrett wore a belt with a moose etched into the buckle. His beard was reminiscent of Thoreau's his gaze fixed on a point several see-fars in the distance. His wife, Alexandra, stood next to him in a battered Stetson, scarf, and wool vest. Their barn was loaded with traditional expeditionary gear: a 16-foot birch-bark canoe made in the style of the Penobscot Indians, snowshoes of bent ash and rawhide, and pack baskets they made themselves of beaten ash strips. A dozen "blanks" of drying ash hung in a side room, to be carved into paddles with a traditional North Woods crooked knife.

The rest of us looked considerably less Thoreauvian in floppy hats and rip-stop nylon jackets, all of us "from away," as they say in Maine: Susanna, an artist from Chicago; Robyn, a social worker from Manhattan; Svea, a former nurse from Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau's home ("I have traveled a good deal in Concord, "he wrote); Svea's granddaughter, Sofia, nine years old, half American, half Italian, from Bologna, in pink boots; and me, a writer from the environs of the nation's capital quietly desperate to escape that region in July.

We had all received the same letter from the Conovers telling us what sort of trip to expect. "If you are reluctant to part from radios, cell phones, satellite phones, and your laptop computers, please seriously consider not participating....Much of the magic in wildlands trips comes from engagement with the present, with natural conditions, and with the temporary tribe of each group."

Our tribe is now about to camp on Lobster Lake, the first night of a five-day lake-and-river journey that would take us 50 miles through north-central Maine. We quickly learn the set-up dance: canoe unloading, tent site selection, tent erection, and, finally, body immersion. The lake is cold enough to get even a Mainer's attention. "Step into my office," says Svea after the swim, and we take turns sitting with her for pulse readings. She is learning about "plant spirit medicine," and explains, "I would like to take each of your pulses every day. The Chinese say that's an integral part of the diagnostic process." I doubt that Thoreau would have been sympathetic to the notion of plants having spirits, despite his transcendentalism, but he would have found it interesting and no doubt would have recorded the experience. Thoreau made three visits to north-central Maine-in 1849 to climb Mount Katahdin and in 1853 and 1857 to reach the headwaters of the Penobscot and Allagash rivers. Along the way he encountered hunters, loggers, and other explorers and passed through a continuous forest that seemed inexhaustible. He took notes about plants, birds, mammals, and other natural phenomena and commented on things as various as the stars and destructive habits of his fellow human beings. He wasn't after financial gain, or sport, but knowledge, valuing wilderness not for its product but for the inspiration and wisdom it could impart to his and future generations.
I am confident that he would have documented the Conovers' cooking routine as well, had he been with us. Garrett has fetched spruce while Alexandra arranged the pack baskets and kitchen boxes ("wanigans"). He cuts foot-long logs with a bow saw while she sets two poles in the ground, lashes the galley pole between them, and suspends buckets on chains. Garrett splits the logs with a fine Swedish ax, produces a flurry of wood shavings and then a crackling fire; Alexandra has the biscuits in motion. He makes a pot of his "decapitated" (decaffeinated) coffee while she peels potatoes and gets the steaks ready. He produces a skillet 18 inches across out of a canvas case, and she prepares my salad.

"Around here the name Thoreau brings a groan," she is saying. "When he came through in 1857 he refused to exchange news of the outside world with a family living at the portage to the Allagash. Thoreau just took off down the trail, and then he got lost. The story was picked up by all the guides in the Chesuncook region, and they have long memories. I heard it from our mentor, Mickey Fahey, who heard it from his, Tommy Smart, who heard it from a guide who was alive at the time."

The tradition of the official Maine guide goes back to 1897, when they were accredited by the state to promote the beauty of Maine and to assure clients from points south that the forests, lakes, and rivers were user-friendly. The first was a woman, six-foot Cornelia "Fly Rod" Crosby, who wrote a newspaper column and convinced one of the railroads operating in Maine to send her to a sportsman's convention in New York's Madison Square Garden with a genuine log cabin and a stuffed moose. So Alexandra is part of an old tradition, but Maine woods lore is much older, and it is the early traditions that got the Conovers interested in making their own pemmican and moccasins sewn from smoked deer hide, and in natural pursuits not related to hunting and fishing. They began their apprenticeships fresh out of college in Maine more than 20 years ago, with liberal arts degrees and a desire to study under the legendary Maine woodsman Mick Fahey. "Garrett and I were already competent outdoors people," Alexandra points out. "Then Mick asked me if I wanted to learn to paddle. I was insulted."

Fahey had learned his skills from Smart and from members of the Penobscot tribe he encountered as a younger man. He taught the Conovers, among other things, to put their bodies into 40 to 60 strokes a minute, with a paddling style and rhythm used by Indians, trappers, and voyageurs of an earlier age, known variously as the Maine stroke, the Canadian stroke, and the North Woods stroke. Fahey taught them much more, "not just to question but to understand nature-astronomy, limnology, forestry. We got so much from him and other old-timers. They opened windows that led to everywhere."

That night, under a crisp quarter moon, a loon calls. The sound is often described as demented, but to me it's the pure, unrestrained voice of the wild, repeated and answered from across the water.

I awake to the crack of Garrett's ax against fresh spruce logs, rise to the smell of bacon in the big skillet, and dine on hash browns and eggs to the tune of Sofia's jokes. ("What do invisible cats drink? .. .Evaporated milk!") Soon I am leaning into my new North Woods stroke on the Penobscot River, watching weeds on the bottom sway like golden hair in the current. A
family of mergansers swims noisily away, a belted king fisher scolds. Every now and then we dip our cups into the pure water to drink, a rare opportunity in America today, though one Thoreau would have taken for granted.

He traveled in 1853 with his cousin, George Thatcher, and an Indian guide, Joe Aitteon, who provided ducks for their breakfast, to go with tea and hard bread; Aitteon spent most of his time trying to shoot a moose. When he succeeded, Thoreau carefully measured it. "I did not wish to be obliged to say merely that the moose was very large." Our tribe has moose on the mind, too. We find tracks of Alces alces in the mud of Ragmuff Stream, not far from that evening's camping spot. The cloven hoof marks look huge.
Thoreau also stayed where we camp for the night, a place known as Smith's Halfway House, named for Ansel Smith, who provided lodging for loggers and later moved a bit north, to the shore of Chesuncook Lake. The foundations are still visible, as is the rock-lined well in the pasture taken over by bunchberry, wild pink roses, and red hawkweed. Fodder was grown here for draft horses used in the days when trees were cut and dumped into the rivers, where they stayed until the spring thaw carried them south.

"Thoreau could not have foreseen that so much of this would remain," Garrett says, showing us around. However, clear cutting has eliminated vast stretches of forest just beyond the tree-lined banks. In Thoreau's day, logging and hunting were the reasons one traveled in the woods. He went against the grain when he wrote, "Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it."

That was close to heresy in the twilight of Manifest Destiny, when the building blocks for a young nation were still coming out of places like this. It seems to me, looking at the remains of Smith's forgotten enterprise and considering the effect of massive clear-cuts beyond the river's fringe of trees, that Thoreau's genius was not in taking off for the wilderness and making sense of the experience, but in having the imagination and daring to question prevailing attitudes about its use.

By the time camp is set up a certain easefulness prevails. Susanna and Sofia sit on the bank, painting with watercolors; Svea has Robyn stretched out on the ground to "release tension" by passing her hands through the air above "congested energy fields." She asks Robyn, whose eyes are shut, what color she would like to see. Robyn says, "Sky blue," which is the overarching hue in this remarkably dry, insect-free passage through country notorious for precipitation and bugs.

Supper is Cornish game hen, parboiled, split and roasted in the skillet, seasoned with paprika, garnished with sautéed chopped celery and almonds and served with rice and squash sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. Passing clouds briefly release raindrops that dimple the river but distract no one from dessert: pineapple upside-down cake that inspires Sofia to squeeze her fingers together in an Italian gesture of pure perfection. This sort of camp life is a dying art in an age dominated by freeze-dried protein and carbos inhaled for hiking up the next mountain. But real food leads to real contemplation in a sepia, stop-frame moment, and I imagine Henry David scribbling on his scraps of paper and Joe Aitteon inspecting his leaky bark canoe.

I'd read that the dying Thoreau's last words were "moose," and "Indians." In the middle of the night I am awakened by the sound of something large stamping about in the shallows, crawl out of my tent and find Robyn already about, wearing a headlamp. "Moose," she whispers, having seen it clamber up the far bank.

South of the Hay Islands the river slows and broadens. The islands were named for fodder grown there to feed the hearty Percherons that hauled logs in Thoreau's day and stayed on the islands year-round. Before we know it we are on Chesuncook Lake, an Indian word meaning "a place where many streams emptied in." A bald eagle tilts high above this luminous, ever-expanding realm that pushes the far bank into the distance.

We are faced with two days of flat water, but first will spend a night on sheets, at Chesuncook Lake House, built near the site of Ansel Smith's structures of 1864. The original homestead included a blacksmith shop, an icehouse, a barn, and a log house that Thoreau considered "but a slight departure from the hollow tree." All that is gone now, the white clapboard house that replaced it owned by a young couple from Massachusetts, die Surprenants, who decided to escape with their five children to a simpler era.

David Surprenant meets us on the shore, in trim beard and Bermudas. He loads our gear into a trailer and hauls it up to the broad front porch that overlooks the water and the mile-high thrust of Mount Katahdin. The village of Chesuncook is readily accessible only by boat. A dirt road crosses marshes that require serious all-terrain capability; the Surprenants use a World War II troop carrier to bring in their supplies.

Chesuncook has a dozen year-round residents. The Conovers lead us to the "Store in the Woods" for a bottle of homemade root beer, and then to the village church. Pilgrim's Hymnals are scattered over the seats, to be picked up when the old pump organ begins to wheeze. Each Sunday an itinerant preacher is brought in. "He may preach to a dozen people or 30," says Alexandra, "depending on whether there are Boy Scouts here."

The cemetery, the ultimate New England social register, is populated with simple stone memorials, including Tommy Smart's, Ansel Smith's, and a sprinkling of Penobscot Indians-all of them associated in some way with Thoreau's memory. Mick Fahey is buried here, too, his gravestone inscribed with a verse from Alfred Lord Tennyson: "I am a part of all that I have met." Fahey died in 1985, and Garrett and Alexandra stand for a while over their old friend. She says, "We brought that stone here in a canoe."

The Lake House porch was made for sitting, and that we do, gazing across at Gero Island, feeling guilty for not having to put up tents. Dinner is served in the dining room, under gaslights unavailable in Thoreau's era and quaint in ours.

On our next-to-last day we cover 14 miles on flat water, the wind banished along with the rain. Scattered across the bright surface of the lake like carefree children, we chatter among ourselves. Sofia reads a Harry Potter book; Alexandra, paddling alone along the shore, sings; Susanna paints the ever-present water, the gray, glacier-smoothed rocks on an endless beach, the sere fallen timber like rough-hewn steps leading to the bright, birch-framed mysteries of the forest.

Thoreau wrote in The Maine Woods: "not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain . . . far in the recesses of wilderness." The same can be said for the rest of us. Our tribe has found in the North Woods good spirits, plant and otherwise, and a kind of pride. I have mastered a version of the North Woods stroke ("mastery" is a tricky word in Maine), and everyone has shed some doubts about the necessity of modern conveniences. We are comfortable in our new element, knowing, of course, that Garrett will get the fire going and Alexandra will bake something to celebrate our last night together- iced lemon cake, in fact, decorated with yellow loosestrife, red osier dogwood, and pearly everlasting, to be digested while watching feathery northern lights climb the vast Maine sky. So no one really cares when wind comes up in the afternoon. We can already see the island where we'll camp; we can almost smell the woodsmoke.