Saving Maine: A Personal Gazetteer

Saving Maine: A Personal Gazetteer

by

Jim Krosschell

Copyright 2011 Jim Krosschell

Smashwords Edition

Blog: One Man's Maine

http://onemansmaine.blogspot.com

Smashwords Edition Licence Notes

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Contents

Part I Awakening

Chapter 1 The Great Spirit

Part II The Icons of Maine

Chapter 2 Light and Air

Chapter 3 Water

Chapter 4 Rock and Stones

Chapter 5 Plants

Chapter 6 Trees

Chapter 7 Animals

Chapter 8 Homo Sapiens

Part III Enlightenment

Chapter 9 The Maine Way of Life

Chapter 10 The Rights of the Land

Chapter 11 At Rest

Biographical Note

Readings

PART I

Awakening

Chapter 1

The Great Spirit

Summers on the lake, a week in July, two weeks in August, were what we lived for. The kids played their hearts out all day, splashing in the water, launching themselves off the shaky dock. We canoed with them to the spring for fresh water, and on the way watched a loon dive and surface, dive and surface as if leading us away from home into new territory. We played a game the kids called bump’n kiss, paddling our inner tubes furiously at each other, crashing, kissing lightly as if brushed by a blonde tress. We lived in the moment.

By eight o’clock the pond would be quiet. The water-skiers had given up and the pontoon party boat delivered its passengers to the comforts of television. On the wide, deep porch, we occupied hammock and rocker, a daughter in each lap, and the sun set over the low western hills, and we read Goodnight Moon for the thousandth time, we prattled about monsters and chocolates, we squeezed to our hearts those precious ones in their Little Mermaid footsies. Then we tucked them in bed in the drafty, spidery, unfinished bedrooms on the second floor, and returned to the porch with a last glass of wine to talk together in the dark, talk of books and writing and family and beauty and lost leisure, and, as August came to its glorious and painful end, talk of the school year to come, the resumption of work, the dread of the business travel that would take me away from family and home.

Maine was a refuge, an antidote to the stress and ambition of the city, a few weeks of regeneration. Why we were drawn to it, why we didn’t buy a vacation cabin in, say, the Berkshires or New Hampshire, wasn’t fully apparent yet. I for one just wanted to get away, to hold onto these moments forever. It worked, more or less, but it was an insult to the state, I guess (and maybe still is, in my new life here) to use Maine mostly as a tonic, a foil against a busy life in Boston. I had no deep connection to the land and was no adventurer and certainly didn’t realize the significance of the early 1990s in Maine, how the battle for its soul, and perhaps mine, was just beginning.

In the 90s Baby Boomers like us were settling into some serious retrenchment. Our idealism was turning into consumerism, and that led to more exploitation of human and natural resources, the exact opposite of the way we lived and believed a couple of decades earlier. It’s not surprising that a nagging need for rest and sanity dogged us. But our children needed the security we didn’t have, and we had to give them everything, didn’t we? Including a few weeks of loons on a Maine pond, and little else about nature and love of the land.

Others were more alert to the new dangers. In Maine, a group of conservationists founded an organization in 1992 called RESTORE: The North Woods. Their immediate concern was that the clear-cutting practices of the paper companies would make the woods a desert, with nothing but thin beauty strips along the roads to shield the public eye from landscapes of stumps and scrub. They also saw the tangle of competing interests in Maine - cottage owners, hikers, hunters, fishermen, snow-mobilers; companies that mine metals, cut wood, plane lumber, cook pulp, develop second homes, guide sports; Mainers that depend on those companies for jobs; tourists that spend money in gateway towns; conservationists, biologists, foresters, preservationists, Thoreau romantics – and wondered how one could possibly judge among them. The answer was to organize support for a new national park in Maine, one bigger than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined, 3.2 million undeveloped acres of forest, mountains, rivers, and lakes. Only the federal government could rise above local interests and declare the independence of the land.

Of the many things that define America, its system of wilderness national parks must be prominent on the list. No other institution bespeaks such American variety, inspiration and self-reliance, and, to be truthful, our schizoid relationship to the land. A national park represents both avarice and salvation. The swamps of the Everglades, the mountains of Glacier, the bears of Yellowstone, the eagles of Acadia, the infinity of the Grand Canyon stand bravely for what once was, what needs to be protected, what still is in spite of ourselves. The frontier is long closed, but the wilderness still defines our restless character, and drives us both onward and inward.

The parks are monuments to the country’s ability to save it from itself. Through luck or foresight or the evolving ethics of land awareness over time, the developers, the miners, the ranchers, all of whom suffer still from that Pilgrim spirit driving out of little Massachusetts, were stopped, or at least thwarted. There are some places that are sacred, the nation has said, not very many perhaps, considering the march of suburban sprawl and the imperatives of business, but enough to preserve some balance in the peculiar duality of the American psyche: the need to conquer, the need to preserve. It’s what we are, and if we didn’t have national parks, we’d have to dream them.

The idea of a Maine Woods National Park did not take hold in the 1990s. The country was too busy raising children, eating out, fattening retirement accounts. Competing interests hollered. Maine already has a national park, some said. It would cost jobs, others complained, and the tree-huggers would ban snowmobiles, not to mention hunting and fishing. And even as the squabbles rose and fell, the ownership of Maine’s woods started to change, from the paper companies to investment trusts.

I should have been alarmed (but was too busy raising children, etc.). RESTORE was alarmed, and changed tactics, putting together an advisory board of some 100 people, termed Americans for a Maine Woods National Park. An A-list, without question: the famous - authors, singers, politicians, scientists, journalists – and the not-so-famous, e.g., a conservation biologist that I worked with in my days of ecology journal publishing; but most importantly (and here our need for dreams comes in like a freight train), an impressive showing of a dozen movie stars, from Robert Redford and Harrison Ford to Meryl Streep and Laura Linney. In one way or another, all of these people make their living from the American dream.

Especially the movie stars, still re-creating the lure of the West, the reach for happiness. Whatever the dream is, whatever it means in the 21st century, I believe it’s especially important to re-discover it now, at a time when extremism increasingly defines the international scene, when economics and its evil twin consumerism dominate the national scene, when discontinuous communication on screens sets the limits of individual lives. It’s crucial to dream. But instead of lost frontiers, and gorgeous faces in close-up, we should dream of what’s near us, in front of us, all around us. Re-connection with the natural world may be all that’s standing between us and a sterile slough of mono-culture.

One night on the pond, perhaps even in the last year of our ownership of that camp, I had a nudge, an awakening in my own dreamscape. At least four pairs of loons summered on North Pond, and that night in late August, 1993 or 1994, they gathered in a circle and went crazy, or so it seemed. It was no stately promenade, not even a pounding slam. It was a frenzied dance of St. Vitus, other-worldly, but which world - heaven or hell, blessing or warning - I’m not sure. The water frothed under their wings and feet, and the air was full of calls and screams. These weren’t postures for a mate, or displays against the threat of a predator too close; these were primitive, or joyous, or furious, or drunk-on-life dances. The dancers were possessed, out of their minds, feral.

I understand now that the loon is not just a symbol of pure waters and peaceful woods and stately grace; in its frantic and inexplicable dance it’s a metaphor of wildness, of the Great North Woods of Maine looming undeveloped to the north, of the vast and unknowable ocean to the east, of any unknown in our lives, however small, of what we as a nation, as individuals, are in danger of losing. Absent serious change, we will lose the notion of a spirit outside of us. We will lose our place in the material world.

What better antidote to clashing religions and galloping greed than the rugged shores and quiet woods and colorful people of Maine? For millions of us Maine’s already got the brand as a symbol of beauty and wilderness, and for thousands it already is a working laboratory of conservation and preservation, a place, for example, where the land trust movement is advancing rapidly. For people like me it’s a dreamland (not to mention a love affair). So why is this place be important in the story of personal as well as national renewal? Because it’s come back from the dead.

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For the purposes of this book, Maine’s history might well have begun on August 31, 1846, when Henry David Thoreau started his first trip to the state. Not that its story before then isn’t fascinating: it is, featuring glaciers that formed the landscape 11,000 years ago, and people who came from Asia shortly thereafter, and Vikings that visited around 1000 AD (they didn’t stay, Maine being apparently too much like Scandinavia), and 500 years of Europeans pushing and shoving for advantage. But it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that the scourge of the land started. For a hundred years and more (until even now), industrialization, development, and the peculiar driving greed of individual capitalism cut all the trees and dug ugly mines and ruined fisheries and exterminated animals and polluted rivers. By the middle of the 20th century Maine was a mess.

Thoreau was there to witness the beginning of the scourge. He witnessed the foresters seeking the huge white pines and the saw mills buzzing and the Indians retreating. Fortunately, he was inspired to set Maine’s spiritual icons on paper and in our minds forever. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in time to prevent the wholesale physical devastation of the landscape: his poor little essays took a while to germinate. But they did at last, and in the youthful minds of the 1960s and 70s his ideas grew as rapidly as lupine in a meadow. Will they survive the new rapacity - excuse me, economic challenges - of the 21st century?

On its website RESTORE says that the Maine woods made such a deep impression on Thoreau that he thought they should become a national preserve. What Thoreau actually said, in the final paragraph of his essay Chesuncook, that describes his second trip to Maine in 1853, is as follows: The kings of England formerly had their forests ‘to hold the king’s game,’ for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them; and I think that they were impelled by a true instinct. Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth,’ — our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, — not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?

Thoreau’s views of the woods were much more complicated than Hollywood and websites make them out to be. Wilderness and civilization, forests and forestry, religion and self-discovery, king and subject, Indian and European are never just opposites in his writings. They are bound together as well as bound to fight. But even though he was essentially a tourist, seldom straying from the comforts of Concord, what a tourist! Unlike the rest of us he threw himself into every situation, driving himself into a deep partnership with the land. Few of us are adventurers, opening our skin to the elements. I for one spend too much Maine time in a chair, or a car, just observing. But that’s the point. The hunters, the fishermen, the hikers of the Appalachian Trail already romance the land. The average American needs grounding most, and even I, known to some parties as slightly obsessed with a sense of place, am only now starting to understand what that means.

RESTORE is right to focus on the strong and simple message. We live in a time more complicated than Thoreau’s, living not only in the flesh but in media. We experience things in person and on screens and often fail to note the difference. Sometimes only shouting wakes us up.

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Five hundred years of the white man’s rule have not been kind to the land. By the early 20th century Maine was almost completely deforested in favor of crops and pasture. That it is almost completely forested again has less to do with conservation or preservation and more to do with the lure of cheap, rich land in the West and the world-wide price of pulp. And now, in the early years of the 21st century, most of northern Maine is no longer owned by the paper companies, as it had been for a hundred years. All the battles fought for wise stewardship and sustainable forestry have to be fought all over again. Real Estate Investment Trusts own much of the woods now, not to mention timber management organizations and limited liability corporations, financial entities that have loyalty to no one and interest in nothing but return on investment. We know what unregulated financial hobgoblins are capable of. The only thing worse than clear-cutting is a tract of suburbia mortgaged to its teeth.

Are the loons still dancing on the lakes? Was what I saw that evening a once-in-a-lifetime wake-up call? No bill promoting a Maine Woods National Park has come to Congress. RESTORE has branched out from its original purpose, now fighting individual development projects and working to recover extirpated and imperiled wildlife, including the eastern timber wolf, Canada lynx, and Atlantic salmon. How far down is Maine on the list of new hopes in America? Well, there’s talk in Washington in supporting something or other in the woods, as long as the buzz words sustainable and jobs are included. I’m not holding my breath; I’m working, by word and deed, to understand the background and change the mindset, no matter how hopeless or illusory the cause.

Absent fickle politics, it’s time to analyze and publicize once again the tremendous opportunity that Maine in general and the North Woods in particular represent, in reality and in our dreams. Places like these are our lifeblood, and we desperately need a transfusion. Maine’s Native Americans, the Wabanaki, thought hard about the genesis of the world. Their solution was to believe that the Great Spirit, at first alone in the world, contemplated what He should do to relieve that loneliness. He fell asleep in His contemplations and dreamed of all sorts of fanciful places and plants and animals and people. When he awoke, it was true. He had dreamed the world’s creatures into existence.

Maine can be a dream come true. It’s coming true for me. In 1962, when I was 12 years old, my family drove from the flatlands of the Midwest to the coast of Maine to visit my professor uncle in Brunswick. I was impressionable (thank God). Popham Beach, Bowdoin College and the Bowdoin Pines, the charm of a New England town, the granite ledges and tidy saltwater farms and deep forests and tidal pools all lodged in my brain but lay dormant for 20 years, occasionally itching. Then in 1983, my future wife and I spent a week at Goose Cove Lodge on Deer Isle and saw Acadia for the first time. It was a perfect day in July, and Bar Harbor with all of its contradictions provided a baguette and brie and grapes and a bottle of Sancerre, and if you don’t think a life can be changed by such a lunch on a granite ledge overlooking Frenchman Bay, you don’t deserve Maine. In the late afternoon we raced back to the lodge and skipped dinner in favor of cognac and chocolate and loving by the fire.

Maine had us. In 1986 we married, bought a Maine camp and christened that first cold October weekend of ownership with the conception of a daughter. We’ve been coming to Maine and worshipping ever since.

And now it’s something more than personal worship. It’s the struggle for the American soul. In my mind religion is the dream of a better world, and therefore that struggle, with our need for constant betterment, is religious as much as economic. The trouble is that religion has been seized by the fanatics and the dogmatics - I know all about that; I was raised under the silly strictures and dour outlook of Calvinism – and increasingly is divorced from the material world. Returning to the land, experiencing wildness, is a way to heal the rift.

Indeed, we might well be at the interstices of different manifest destinies: since 1620 those bureaucrats and ministers and farmers from the flatlands of England’s East Anglia have ruled this country, a tide of capitalism and Calvinism sweeping out of Plymouth, Massachusetts and eating up forests and prairies, rivers and lakes, hills and mountains, making vast wastelands not only on this continent but all others as well. It’s now time to consider again, as the kids of the 60s tried to do, the quieter values of the people of England’s West Country and France’s Catholic Church, those fishermen and traders and priests who settled in New England and Atlantic Canada and loved the land and its people.

The history of Maine is already slightly different from the rest of the New World. Being remote from Massachusetts and poor, it was an 18th century construct, escaping some, but not all, of the Puritanism of 17th century America. Some of those Pilgrim loners and adventurers and conquerors came to virgin Maine, of course, thinking the natives were savages who didn’t use land as God directed. They had no compunctions against taking and consuming and killing, and Maine still bears the scars of their holy avarice. But the love of the land has always been strong here, and more and more that love is being codified and that land is being saved.

In this struggle of destinies, the elements and places and plants and animals of our country are icons to be worshipped in the church of nature. Like the Navajo Nation, like the incredible continent of America, Maine walked in beauty, then suffered terribly. But its people never lost a sense of place, not even in its cities and suburbs, since the icons have remained within reach. In Maine, fantasies and realities mix freely. Hiking trails run near your backyard. An island beckons to your livid life. A moose can surprise you even near Portland.

Maine is a place for hard heads and soft hearts. Here are the iconic proofs of its inspiration for millions, its saving grace for me.

PART II

The Icons of Maine

Chapter 2

Light and Air

Throughout the winter in Maine, for the five months of the year starting on October 7 and lasting to March 6, Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park is the first place in the United States to receive the morning sun’s light. It is a place of worship: the pink granite of the mountain rises 1,500 feet directly out of the sea, the luscious Cranberry Isles lie just offshore to the south, the blue of the sky intensifies the blue of the ocean, the sunshine streams from the east across the Schoodic Peninsula and Frenchman Bay. By October the summertime crowds are gone. The air seems extra pure, hinting at the