Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (53 page)

It was time to call up my favorite Quaker apothegm: proceed as the way opens. Off we went, slowly, giving wide berth to log trucks — though few — and their trail of airborne rocks. After puzzling through a couple of crossroads, Q said, “What do you think? Onward?” It’s trickier than I’d imagined, I said, but Daniel Boone and I have never been lost, although — as he admitted — we’ve been once or twice confused for a couple of weeks. All I need to do is keep us from going too far west or east and hitting a dead end. “Won’t the compasses keep us straight?”

The problem was this: some northering roads had portions running east or west, and in one place, even south. When a change of direction happened at a junction, the correct road might head off for a few miles in the wrong direction and the wrong road in the correct direction. I had new comprehension of what the first cross-country automobilists faced in the days before highways and route markers.

Q was at the wheel and I at the chart table of my lap holding the two maps, both of which I quickly put aside because they left the roads unlabeled. But
The Maine Atlas
did show some names, and when an intersection actually had a sign, I was able to fix our position. At several crossings or forks, I hopped out to hunt in the brush for an overgrown or knocked-down marker, one of which I picked up to match the post to its broken base to see which direction it formerly pointed. Those hunts could last until the blackflies found me.

Except from the little bridges, trees blocked long views, although occasionally I could look fifty or sixty feet into the trees to see more trees, many of which I assumed were only a screen masking a clear-cut a few yards on beyond. It was as if we moved in a tunnel cut through heavy fog. (Whoever first uttered that old platitude “Can’t see the forest for the trees” may have been then in the Maine Woods.) Yet the forest I saw wasn’t the ancient and mossy giants of spruce and fir I had hoped for; rather, it was deciduous trees mixed with scrawny conifers and much scrub. The lack of sight lines, of course, is part of the experience of the Maine Woods, and our moving half blindly did give a sense of remoteness, even if more imagined than actual. When we came upon an occasional unscreened clear-cut, it was
almost
possible to be grateful for the longer — if unnatural — view it allowed of the roll in the landscape.

In a way, navigation was easy — that is, useless — because other than turning back, there was only one direction to go until we came to a junction where finding the way was a matter of reading a text of three letters, a little alphabet of decisions: an X
,
a Y
,
a T
.
After an hour, it became clear many crossings differed one from the other as does dawn from daybreak, your right thumb from your left. At nondescript intersections, I would hop out to drag a heel into the gravel. And, amazingly, at one place, I discovered my mark ten miles farther had somehow migrated to the opposite side. I said, How could this crossroad be Cyr Road if we’re
on
Cyr Road which, according to the map, we have to be? Q: “Maybe a prankster moved the sign.” (It must be said here, should you ever visit the North Maine Woods and come upon a log hauler who welcomes your presence, who will slow down to give directions, you have met a Samaritan indeed. I would not want it otherwise: part of my reason for going in was to see whether — relying little on human assistance — I could find a course all the way through and out again with mind and marriage still intact.)

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 franchised 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.”