The dusty pickup growled over the logging road, a cloud of dust softening the outlines of leafless trees behind us. Before sunrise, we left the camp in Allagash Village, Maine, loaded up with canoes and a week’s worth of supplies. Only a few days after our final exams our group found ourselves a long way from Yale’s warm, leafy quads. Brandon, our driver, pushed hard down the Telos road into the forest, toward the headwaters of the Allagash River where he would drop us off. He told us that he hadn’t met any Yale students before, nor did he have many clients from downstate this soon after ice out on the lakes.
Since the fall of the great paper companies decades ago, he said, out-of-state financiers, investment companies, and rich universities (like ours, he pointed out) had been cutting the forest like a cornfield. Trees barely thick enough for a two-by-four were cut down to make the rich, who live somewhere down past Portland, richer. As we drove, hundreds of acres stood bare along the road. Brandon lamented the animals: lynx, bobcats, moose, deer, and bears, who were losing their habitats as a result of this deforestation, not to mention the fisheries destroyed by silt runoffs. But Brandon was not upset with the loggers themselves. The loggers setting into the woods with chainsaws and skidders were his friends and neighbors, who were just as worried as Brandon about unsustainable cutting practices, which jeopardized their jobs. In a community where folks had driven more than two hours for last night’s mother-son dance at the rec hall, neighbors looked after each other.
***
Our two rented canoes sat low in the water of Chamberlain Lake under the week’s supply of food and equipment. We desperately dug at the water with our paddles, battling a powerful headwind that halted our forward progress. Exhausted and realizing the futility of our efforts, we paddled like hell to reach an exposed gravel spit. Wrestling the vessels sideways, our lack of canoeing experience made itself clear, as water rushed over the gunwales, stranding our canoe in chest-deep water. Instinct, panic, and vague memories of canoeing in Boy Scouts kicked in as we hauled our swamped ships up the beach. A thousand pounds of water poured out over the pebbles of the shore. Even our drybags were soaked as we dragged ourselves up past the treeline, away from the steady rain. It was going to be a cold night.
***
Ice flakes fell from the tent flaps as we pushed them open, blinking in the silver light of the morning. Numb fingers pointed to our location on the map as we planned our next week on the waterway, acknowledging with quick glances toward one another that we were well behind our ambitious schedule. We had a long journey ahead of us from the lakes of central Maine to the Allagash River’s confluence with the St. John at the Canadian border. Worry hung over our group of four college classmates as we sorted through our gear for the driest clothing available and brought a fire to life.
In the wilderness, nothing is as miserable as wet socks, and we had no shortage of those. As soon as smoke rose from our piled birchbark, we set about drying them, ringing our small fire with a half-dozen wet wool socks that steamed as they were warmed by the flame. We passed around a jar of marmalade dug out of a pack. Our spirits brightened around the warmth of the fire. The map reemerged. A new course was charted. We were ready to get back to the water.
Then we looked back at the socks. Steam turned to smoke and the fire blackened the heel of each sock. As the sun just started to brighten the sky, we loaded up once more and paddled onto the lake.
***
Our momentum did not last. After only a few hours of paddling, our group was assailed with heavy winds that felt even stronger than the gusts that had swamped our canoe just the day before. Not wanting to risk a second dunk in the frigid waters of the Allagash, we decided to pull our boats out and wait for more manageable conditions. But conditions did not improve. As the sun sank low on the horizon and threatening bronze waves continued to pin us to the bleak shoreline, the reality of the situation set in. Far from the nearest campsite, we found ourselves sheltering in a dense stand of spruce flanking a thin sliver of beach. No one had set foot in these woods since the last time it was logged in the 70s. We could find no clearing large enough to erect our tent and the bitterly cold wind thwarted our hopes of comfort on the shore. Donning as many layers as we could, our group huddled together around a tree, dozing under its relative shelter. We slept beneath the trees and the stars.
***
As days wore on, we found an atmosphere of rustic domesticity at each of our campsites. Within minutes of pulling ashore, we had a fire roaring. Over the flames, we warmed a tin bucket of water, which helped us wash our dishes and thaw our numb fingers and toes. We threw meat, onions, potatoes, carrots, and cabbage into our Dutch oven, which simmered over the fire into a hearty stew. Our reflector oven churned out batches of simple biscuits. By the time the tent was pitched and the daylight faded, our bellies were full, and bags were packed with breakfast and lunch for the next day. Even a green hand who had never before camped or paddled was fully in the rhythm of the river.
***
After a series of long days on the river, our group was in desperate need of a wash. Rinsing in the river seemed an obvious and refreshing choice. The four of us stripped down and stepped hesitantly into the cold water, dunked our sore, sweaty bodies, and darted back to the shore shouting and laughing. As the afternoon sun warmed our shivering skin and blood returned to our limbs, the aching in our backs and shoulders faded and we were started out of our fatigue. It became a daily ritual for us to wade out into the lazily flowing river after setting up camp, sink down to our necks, and control our gasping breaths until we could sit, comfortably numb, for a few minutes in water hovering somewhere between frozen solid and just downright cold. A bath in the Allagash does more than clean the skin; it reawakens the soul.
***
Riding the current of the Allagash as it meanders through nearly a hundred miles of unbroken wilderness is a blissful, almost transcendent experience. On days without much wind, our canoes cut effortlessly through the water. Portaging around the various dams, rills, and rapids that span the waterway, however, was decidedly more challenging. The longest portage, around the iconic Allagash Falls, required us to unload our canoes and hike our equipment a half-mile to the misty base of the waterfall before reloading and pushing off. A few heavily laden trips down the trail got our blood pumping. We used a two-man strategy for our culminating effort, transporting the canoes over the Falls. One guy rested the yoke of the canoe on his shoulders, head swallowed by its hull, and followed the verbal commands of his partner, who walked out in front and guided the blind boat-bearer around stumps and roots and rocks. Each canoe had sprouted a pair of legs and was timidly testing them out under the encouragement of its former captain.
***
Despite our tendency to waterlog our belongings, a few battered books made it down the river with us. One day, huddling under a stand of cedars to escape biting snow flurries, we spent hours reading aloud passages from damp pages of wilderness survival manuals and Maine-themed literature. The Northern White Cedar, forming neat hedgerows around the rivers and lakes of Maine, is also known as the arbor vitae, or tree of life. A tea made of its leaves, according to Peterson’s venerable field guide, was used by the Indigenous peoples of Canada to cure Cartier’s men of scurvy when they made landfall in the winter of 1535. Henry David Thoreau’s Maine Woods reminded us that we were far from the first college fools to penetrate this wilderness, as Thoreau had done in the 1850s with his Penobscot guide Joe. Still, we had made it further north than the eminent philosopher, and we did our own paddling and portaging. No hired guide for us.
***
Paddling down the gray ribbon of the Allagash one morning, we glided around a bend and spotted a dark shape. A mother moose, about halfway across the river, waded through water up to her belly. Behind her, clear against the morning’s frost, stood her calf on a small island mid-stream, quivering. It couldn’t have been more than a week old. As we watched, holding water a few hundred yards upstream, the cow plodded up the opposite bank and disappeared into the spruce thicket. The calf marched out, all elbows and knees, awkward legs as long as its body. It wobbled into the current a few yards, then froze and whistled. Its mother did not call back. As northbound Canada geese wheeled overhead, the calf turned back to its island and stood under a shrub, alone. Tucked behind our bend in the river, we watched. The calf wobbled and shook. After ten or fifteen minutes, it went quiet, and sat down.
***
On our last full day on the river, we found paradise: at the unoccupied ranger station of Michaud Farm, the warm sun smiled down on a broad opening among the trees. A bald eagle wheeled overhead; an American flag snapped in the gentle breeze. The river, now wide and slow, teemed with fish as it wound down to the Allagash Village. We enjoyed a pan of beans heated over a fire as Canada jays flitted among the trees. We even noticed the first green buds of spring emerging on the birches.
