It takes six hours to get to Medawisla, Maine, from Montpelier, no matter how you cut it. What with tourist traffic, RVs, chip and logging trucks, and wandering moose north of Skowhegan, you need to be able to relax and take what you can get. As a McDonald’s devotee, I appreciate the watering holes in Lancaster, N.H., and Rumford, Maine. As a cheapskate, I nurse my gas till I hit the (currently) $2.18-per-gallon gas in Gorham, N.H. And as a lover of elbow room, I breathe a bit easier as the car leaves Greenville, Maine, behind. Twenty miles out, half a mile beyond the hamlet of Kokadjo — fishing tackle, groceries, beer, cabins for rent, bar and restaurant — the pavement ends and the word “Medawisla” begins to pop up beside the road on signs with arrows pointing right or left.
Northern Maine — as distinct from coastal Maine and tourist-trap Maine — has for centuries been home to hardy forest-dwelling people. Abenakis (“People of the Dawn”), French and English fur traders, Yankee loggers and today’s machinery and logging truck drivers — they’ve all been tough cookies inured to near-Arctic winters and damp, sweltering summers. Even today’s tourists, with canoes, kayaks and mountain bikes strapped to their vehicles, know they’d best bring along a good ration of Off and DEET; the black flies, deer flies, mooseflies, mosquitoes and no-see-ums are all fiercely dedicated to exacting a toll on summer folks.
When the first axe-wielding loggers in the mid-1800s viewed the seemingly limitless miles of virgin white pine, they predicted they’d last them forever. “Forever” turned out to be about 20 years, and then it was time to go to work on the spruce and fir, and stripping the hemlocks for tanbark. If there was any awareness of conservation ethics or habitat-friendly practices, it was well hidden. Ever-larger timber corporations took control of the woodlands and over time replaced the colorful (and wasteful) river drives with all-weather gravel highways for their semitrailer logging trucks. If you travel on one of these private roads today, you must surrender right-of-way to trucks; and there are occasional checkpoints and some toll booths. (I get through free because I’m over 75.) It’s not the world’s safest place for passenger vehicles. I was run off the road once by one of them myself. Just yesterday I read that an SUV driver, following an empty truck and blinded by the notorious yellow clay dust it kicked up, had crashed into it when it stopped. The trucks always win these encounters; the SUV driver was killed and his vehicle demolished.
Early in the 20th century, when railroads began to pierce this wilderness, intrepid tourists discovered that they could get here from Boston with only two days’ travel: the first by train, with an overnight at a rustic hotel, and a second by wagon or buckboard to “sporting camps” where they were catered to and could catch native trout or salmon, hunt for deer or moose, or rusticate in the beauty of the lakes.
Unconstrained logging continued, however. One wealthy man, Percy Baxter, governor of Maine from 1921-1925, foresaw the ultimately ruinous results and began, with his own fortune (the Legislature refused to get into it), to purchase logged-out, worthless tracts of land for a relative pittance from logging companies with no further interest in them. Eventually he was able to put together, like a patchwork quilt, 28 tracts, which became spectacular Baxter Park, crowned by mighty Mount Katahdin and protected in perpetuity by an airtight deed to the people of Maine.
In recent years the Appalachian Mountain Club, which has pretty much reached saturation in the White Mountains with its string of high-mountain huts a day’s hike apart, has begun expanding into northern Maine. To date, its so-called Maine Woods Initiative, has purchased and protected about 75,000 acres of Maine forest land in the middle of the Appalachian Trail’s famous 100-Mile Woods. It has renovated or replaced three old sporting camps that, with a fourth, privately owned, camp, provide lodge-to-lodge hiking, biking or skiing year-round. At the same time, conscious of the fact that life in this neck of the woods depends largely on forest products, AMC dictates continued sustainable logging practices on its land and, as here at Medawisla, employs local contractors to do the construction work.
The TV crew and I have been at Medawisla, the northernmost of the camps, on Second Roach Pond, which, in spite of its unprepossessing name, is lovely. The shores, except for Medawisla (Abenaki for “loon”), are pristine — though going briefly ashore to avoid a thunderstorm, we discovered an ancient logging tote road slowly disappearing in the brush.
Our first night here we had an experience new to all of us: a paddle to a campsite led by two Maine guides. They cooked supper and breakfast while we sat around feeling useless, but pampered. Maggie, the 2-year-old with us, chased bubbles spun by one of the guides, and then helped out with the dishes. We paddled back to Medawisla next day, scouting the shore for browsing moose, and are spending the night, feeling very pampered again, in brand-new cabins (think hot showers!). The original plan was to preserve and renovate Medawisla’s old cabins, but inspection deemed it a bad option; so the entire camp was razed and sturdy new buildings put up in their place. Off the grid, it opened just over three weeks ago. It’s pretty raw still — it’ll be a year or two before the robust Maine jungle grows over the bulldozer scars and mulched treetops. It will eventually look as though it’s always been here — well, since the invention of electricity, at least.
I’m off to bed early, and will try to get on the road at first light about 4:30. If it’s not too foggy and I don’t get held up too often by moose in the road, I’ll be home before noon.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
