Debsconeag Dilemas: Some Thoughts on Stewardship in the Maine Woods
Written in 2013, when I was Site Manager for the Chewonki Foundation at Fourth Debsconeag Lake
The hydrostatic gearing on the four-wheeler whines when I let up on the throttle. The machine slows on the narrow logging bridge crossing Nahmakanta Stream, and the plastic buckets in the trailer roll forward, clattering against the metal mesh of the trailer box. When I stop there’s only the idle of the engine and the sound of the water below. It’s the first week of August, but the air is cool and dry here in northern Maine, the sky a deep blue, a cool breeze moving in the leaves. After July’s heat, this day is nothing but satisfying.
Nahmakanta Stream
To my left, the stream descends past a pool and then on around a bend. Pemadumcook Lake is about four miles downstream, Nahmakanta Lake a quarter mile back uphill through the trees. Six or seven weeks ago this was a roaring tumult, swelled by heavy June rain. Today it has settled into late summer and there are more rocks than water. It’s been a kind of ritual this season to stop here when I cross and note the subtle daily changes. I say ritual because this bridge marks the intersection of parts of my life, and that’s been on my mind all summer.
Just after finishing graduate school down in Orono, I hiked through here on the Appalachian Trail. This area is part of the Hundred Mile Wilderness, and the AT crosses right over there on the other side of the river. I stood on this bridge all those years ago, wondering where the road went in either direction. Then I walked on downstream and thought no more of it until I found myself back here this June. That day and this spot existed in a very narrow geography for me until now, but I have been stopping here regularly to think about how personal history often loops around on itself – not quite déjà vu but strange, nonetheless.
This area is the heart of the Debsconeag Lakes Wilderness and the Nahmakanta Public Reserve and I’m the temporary site manager for a facility that’s back down the road on a peninsula in Fourth Debsconeag. I had planned to be a thousand miles north this summer, continuing work on the impacts of logging and other resource extraction in the boreal forest of central Quebec, but an old friend has cancer, and her husband needed personal time from this job. I came to help support a summer wilderness tripping program out at camp, to keep the systems running. The job has been a detour in some ways, but it has allowed me to reacquaint myself with a landscape I love here in Maine, and to remember some things I had forgotten about the northwoods.
I cross this bridge frequently now, going to Greenville or Millinocket for supplies and equipment. All the roads around here, the logging operations and private camps too, are as familiar to me as the trail over there was once. And what has been curious to me this whole summer is that this spot is really the only place where those two geographies intersect. The first time I recognized that fact it struck me, but as I’ve continued to pass this way, there is more to this place than some neat personal convergence. I press the throttle and roll slowly forward, over the lip of the bridge, and onto the dirt road again. The trailer and its contents rattle loudly again as they make the transition.
The road on the camp side of the bridge is a class IV affair, one step above a logging trace. On this side it’s much wider and smoother. The state recently did substantial work to make it even better, including making the AT parking area bigger, and that’s why I’m out here this morning. They left a nice pile of sand behind when they were done, and I’m going to get a few buckets to augment a fire ring back on the peninsula. The land out there is bony, the remains of a glacial esker. There’s a thin layer of organic material, but everywhere I’ve dug below that surface it’s been only egg-sized to baseball-sized cobbles. There’s little in the way of sand like this, so I want to get some this stuff before the leftovers wash away in the next rain. Two days ago, I was wiring in a new generator, yesterday replacing a leaking hot water heater, and today I’m scavenging sand – it’s a varied and interesting life out here.
I line the buckets up and start shoveling. There are dragonflies dodging and weaving around in the breeze. I expected there to be horseflies too – they love dirt roads like this – but so far, I guess it’s still too cool today. The sand makes a satisfying sifting sound on the plastic as it slides down the sides of the buckets. An occasional rock clatters, and the bigger ones I fish out. I’ve got enough rocks at camp.
The trail back to camp.
As I finish filling one bucket, I look up and see two hikers emerge out of the woods on the downstream side of the road, headed north on the AT. I wave and say hello. They wave back and smile but keep walking and quickly disappear into the trees on the other side. I’m a little disappointed. I’ve had some nice talks here this summer with hikers – reliving old memories mostly – and this would be a good day for one of those unhurried conversations. I watch the intersection for a moment, curious about their lack of interest in me, and then go back to filling buckets. North-bounders are often preoccupied, being only two days from Katahdin at this point. Maybe I look a bit disreputable too, with my green and white plastic buckets and four-wheeler. I’m not what they expected to see this morning.
When the other buckets are filled and strapped into the trailer, I put the shovel in behind, and lean against the machine and look around at the beautiful day again. Everywhere in New England fall shows itself long before summer ends – early color in the wetlands, occasionally cooler air and clearer skies, lower sun in the mornings and evenings. Today is the first day I’ve noticed this year. Time often feels very cyclical on autumn days to me, so that past things seem close at hand. It’s what I’ve been feeling all summer at this spot really. I almost expect to see myself stepping out onto the road again, to momentarily ponder this stream before ducking back into the trees.
And maybe I understand something now about those folks a minute ago and how they might have perceived me and my buckets.
I clearly remember the morning, four days south of here, when I reached the road down at Gulf Hagas. The Gulf is a canyon full of beautiful waterfalls, with dramatic names like Screw Auger and Jaws, and a very popular place for day hiking. That morning, after coming down off Whitecap Mountain and fording the West Branch of the Pleasant River, I had to stop short as a car roared by on the way to the parking area. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I had driven that road the year before, but nevertheless it disturbed me, and not only because the driver was going too fast.
There was a palpable sense of dissonance, even intrusion in the encounter. This is the “Hundred Mile Wilderness” after all. There’s a sign at the trailhead, warning hikers to carry eight to ten days of food, and the implication is that these woods are isolated. The Hundred Mile Wilderness is not advertised as a place where you will have to dodge cars or talk to guys with ATVs shoveling sand into buckets. I was likely the source of intrusion and dissonance today if those hikers had never thought about the possibility of having this kind of encounter.
I knew better that day at the Gulf. I had studied the history and current use of this forest for years, but I had let myself forget after a few days on the trail. Most hikers don’t have the benefit of study and don’t really think about the fact that the AT here is a greenway in a landscape of wood fiber and capital. That there are many things going on in here besides hiking is not their reality. The fact remains that access in here isn’t limited nearly as much because of remoteness, as it is by the legal structure of multiple ownership and multiple use. The state and conservation organizations started buying some of this land, beginning back in the 1980s, but millions and millions of acres are still owned by big companies who control access. That’s the nature of this place.
This is something that has crossed my mind many times this summer as I’ve talked to hikers and even the staff back at camp. Walking in these woods, one must constantly remember that all the roads in here, the one down by Gulf Hagas and this one I’m on this morning, have been here longer than the Appalachian Trail. Most people never think about that, and the idea of “wilderness experience” and the romance of the trail are powerful cultural forces that lull people into the same forgetfulness I experienced. But whether people think about it or not, the history which the AT traverses still defines this place – two centuries of private ownership, resource extraction, and industrial infrastructure.
And this is the history of the vast majority of northern Maine. By the time of statehood, in 1820, easterners were already flooding west onto the prairie. The rocks and long winters of the northern forest hardly compared to the milder Midwest, with its deep, rich soils, so any dreams of a northern frontier filled with farmers quickly gave way to selling public lands to logging interests. Few towns were ever established up here, only privately held townships, and this became a working landscape filled with river booms and driving dams to keep the logs moving, scores of logging camps to house hundreds of men as they cut their way across the forest, and forest farms to grow the food that kept the men and horses going. That world is gone now. Roads replaced the rivers for moving wood, and loggers now commute. Yet that history is still integral to all the uses of this forest, including hiking on the Appalachian Trail.
The forest is heavily used in northern Maine.
That might sound odd, but there’s a wonderful example of this at a place called Rainbow Stream Lean-to, a day’s walk south of the Golden Road. Those hikers who just passed will probably be there tomorrow, and I hope they see what I did when I camped there nine years ago.
The site is idyllic, with the lean-to tucked in down by the stream and a little hillside rising behind. It was sunny the day I arrived, the ground covered in pine needles, and I rolled out my sleeping pad for a nap. After a while I got up and started exploring, only to find a trail that led back into the woods from the back of the site. It wasn’t marked, and someone had covered up the entrance with brush on purpose, but it was a clear trail once I got on it. My curiosity was piqued, and I followed it straight back into the woods for about a quarter mile before it met a logging road that seemed to parallel the stream. It was used but was one of those tracks laced throughout New England, made for and by horses and jeeps, not big trucks or skidders. It was all grassy between the wheel ruts – very inviting on a warm summer afternoon – and so I followed it north.
I walked about a mile and got a nice treat for my effort. There, left abandoned in the middle of the woods, was one of those old nineteenth-century driving dams – a fascinating wreck of that old industrial world. These were designed to build up a head of water to flush out places, either to prevent or dislodge logjams. A jam in a gorge like Gulf Hagas could tie up tens of thousands of logs, and river drivers would take extraordinary risks to clear them – walking out on them to “pick” the key log in the jam or blowing it clear with dynamite. These places meant death for some, and thus the names, like Screw Auger and Jaws, given by those left behind.
Back at camp, while dinner was cooking, I dug out my maps for some context. The road I had been walking was far bigger a mile in the other direction, a full gravel logging road running up the shoreline of Nahmakanta Lake. I know now that this road I’m on this morning intersects with that one about two miles up the hill from here. I’ve driven it many times this summer, but even then, I was sure that it connected to the outside world. I was also sure that this was the way the Maine Appalachian Trail Club accessed the site for servicing. Why else would the trail be there?
That path to the site fascinated me as I ate my dinner. Clearly the MATC used both road and trail but kept access camouflaged. It seemed a little like finding the tunnels under Disneyland the more I thought about it. That thought made me smile, but questions arose which are still relevant in this forest as I sit here this morning. Why advertise and romanticize this as the Hundred Mile Wilderness, when it is quite clearly a hundred-mile walk through hundreds of years of human history? Thousands of years really, if we acknowledge Native people’s sovereignty and stewardship here before the eighteenth century.
Twenty years ago, environmental historian William Cronon asked similar questions in an essay titled, “The Trouble with Wilderness.” In it he accurately pointed out, not only the forgetfulness I’ve been thinking about, but also that wilderness, as we think of it today, did not exist before the creation of the urban-industrial world in the nineteenth century. Early colonist fretted over a wilderness in need of taming, not one that needed preservation. They certainly never thought of going out in the wilderness for relaxation.
It was the growth of that urban-industrial world that laid this forest low in the nineteenth century. Wood not only built the cities, but the lumber market made many investors rich. Logging companies first took the white pines, trees that towered a couple of hundred feet when they were mature. By the 1860s they were taking the spruce because the pine were gone. By the 1880s little of value was left for the timber market, and companies moved their operations to the Upper Midwest, where they repeated what they had done across the whole northeast. Then they moved on again – the longleaf pine forests of the South and the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. This kind of cutting is still happening now in the boreal forests of Canada.
Lumber companies sold their Maine lands to paper interests, which clearcut smaller pulpwood, and this was the heart of the local economy until the 1970s when the paper market also began to find better places to operate. The bad ecological effects of two centuries of overuse are still quite evident here, despite a lot of recovery, and the depressed local economy in northern Maine lingers too. The connection between ecology and economy are not made nearly enough, but the economy will likely not recover until the ecology does.
Maine has acquired some big chunks of reserve land now, to aid in ecological recovery and preservation, and you might well ask whether the Debsconeag Lakes Area or the Nahmakanta Reserve or the Hundred Mile Wilderness are a bulwark in protecting the forest in the future. I worry about that. Creating wilderness reserves still too often involves forgetting the history I’ve been thinking about. It often overlooks how much wood our economy still demands too. And these not only define our recreational relationships with places like the AT, but our resource-use relationships around the world, in places like the northern boreal forests.
Wildernesses are not ecologically definable but are cultural creations that grow out of people’s need to escape the consequences of urbanization and industrialization. It’s identical to the wilderness that colonists encountered in terms of being a work of imagination. Colonizers, instead of seeing lands cared for and occupied for millennia by Native people, saw a howling, biblical wilderness that they needed to conquer. So as different as those ideas of wilderness are from one another, there is a symbiotic relationship between them. And here is where the historical and intellectual questions become far more current and practical in terms of how we use this forest.
The creation of preserved wilderness in one place almost always means the opening of another wilderness in need of taming. This has been the history here in the US, as the conservation movement grew hand in hand with western expansion. And it continues to be in other places around the world. My work in the boreal north involves resource issues, but more importantly, the cultural ramifications of resource use, and what I’ve been thinking about applies. We buy lumber from the north because we have worked to protect land closer to home. This has made it expedient and profitable for politicians and industry there to define the north as an empty wilderness – a new forest primeval – which they can exploit. They have imposed that definition, on both land and people there, in the same way it happened here two hundred years ago. This is the most troubling aspect of wilderness for me.
I have a lot of respect for working people in these woods, and I use a lot of wood products. I believe that we must use our forests in the future, but I have a lot of fear about how that will happen. There are places, not too far from here, where a hard bottom line is still driving poor cutting practices. Because of cutting up north, the pressure on these woods is less, but another decade will see the end of the northern forest. Then the bottom line here will look a lot different, and this is where the history of this place will meet both ecology and economy. It’s also where our larger understanding of this forest will become vital to its future.
I start up the four-wheeler and ease it out on the road and onto the bridge. I’ll have to take it slower going back, to keep from spreading this sand all over. The road has gotten worse through the season, as we’ve driven vans and trailers back and forth over it daily, and there are some big potholes that I slalom around. I drive down through the boat landing, looking again at the canoe trailer to be repaired this afternoon. After the landing, the road turns into a wide path for a quarter mile, and then a rough trail. I flip the switch to shift into four-wheel drive as I go over the first big bridge, gun it a bit to get the trailer up and over, then guide it over and around all the rocks and mud holes.
I go slowly now to keep my load in place, but even so the wheels dig at the earth as I scramble along. As I said, it was unusually rainy earlier this year, and even in dry spells parts of the trail have always been muddy and boggy. The trail also goes up and over a highpoint, by going inland from the shore, and so it gets into a lot of steep terrain. It takes this route so that the walking trail for guests can stick close to the lake. This means that there is serious erosion every time I drive in and out. I take the boat to bring as much as I can into camp, but driving is necessary. The main buildings are up on a short, steep rise and there are things too awkward and heavy to load in the boat or carry from the dock.
I’ve been thinking a lot this summer about those macro issues of how this forest will be used, and its relationship to the woods up north, but I’ve also been thinking about micro relationships too – relationships between the forest and this ATV trail and our camp out on the point. Stewardship here should be the goal – not only short-term use of the forest, but a way of seeing and using the land that leaves it better in the end – but it’s more than just a forestry, or even a forest management issue. I think most people understand that stewardship means using the forest responsibly, and that this means managing demand as well as cutting. I’m not sure how many people understand how important the ways we think about the forest are for stewardship. Not just thinking about forestry, or our demand for wood, but thinking about our expectations.
A couple of weeks’ worth of propane.
I would love not to have to use this machine but eliminating it would mean not just eliminating a piece of technology, but also the expectations that are borne of that technology – my own, as well as the expectations of others. I passed the compost bins back there at the height of the trail, for example. Would I be willing to carry all that out here by hand? We make a lot of compost, and it’s heavy and wet. Part of this is our menu choices, but it is also just the normal waste we are used to as a society. Or would others be willing to let the compost be closer to camp? That would depend on which way the wind was blowing I imagine. The same questions must be asked about all the food and resources going into camp, and the trash and recycling being taken out. This ATV, like all our technology, makes certain answers to which we are accustomed possible out here.
I park the machine behind the dining hall and shower house, by the propane bottles and the generator, and I go inside. I pour a cup of coffee and walk over to check the battery meter to see how we are doing after a morning of bright sun. The electrical system is a hybrid, there are solar panels on the roof and a bank of storage batteries down under the building, so after eight weeks on the job, I check their level unconsciously whenever I am in the building. In addition to the solar, there is also the generator that I run between five and eight hours a day, depending on how much sun we have. I try to run it as little as possible, because it’s noisy and uses fuel that I haul in here with the four-wheeler, but there is no getting away from running it. We don’t have enough solar capacity and we use a lot of power.
We pump water out of the lake and that is a huge draw, using so much power that I only run the pump while the generator is running. The bulk tanks are up here in the dining hall, thirty feet above lake level. We are also a public facility, serving meals made from perishable food, so the state requires that our refrigeration meet all the standards that any hotel or restaurant would have to meet. This is not unreasonable, but our choice of menu means we run a walk-in cooler and chest freezer all day, every day. We have electric lights in this building for the kitchen and office upstairs. We have satellite phone and internet service too. Like the ATV, all this aligns the program with cultural demands, and negotiating conscious and unconscious expectations has been one of the more challenging parts of my job this summer.
All summer I’ve been trying to get people to think more carefully about lights, or keeping the cooler door closed as much as possible or being conscious of the energy it takes to pump all the water we use. And they have all tried to be thoughtful. Yet behavior surrounding energy and technology is so engrained in us that it’s hard for any of us to adapt. I’ve found myself getting a little obsessed with the whole thing – always checking that meter on the wall for instance – but my obsession is reasonable, considering that I haul the fuel and spend my days watching power and water levels. Like the rest of the world these days, we are a resource-intensive little community out here on this peninsula. We are reliant on energy and technology, and our world is polluted – mostly by noise in this case. Our use is large, and our renewable capacity is never enough to break any of that dependency.
I realized a couple of weeks ago that I’ve gotten caught on the wrong side of the idea and experience of wilderness to which this camp is dedicated. This place is not an escape from the technological, urban-industrial world, but instead a rather ironic microcosm of it. In this job, it is nearly impossible to ignore the endless input and the frustrating lack of renewable capacity, yet my work allows others to do just that on a daily basis. And this is directly related to what I was thinking about earlier. Not thinking about the history of this land, and those macro issues of resource use, also allows us to overlook the irony in which I am trapped.
None of us here at this facility – and we are all people who try to live with an ecological consciousness – has ever had to live within real ecological limits. We have thought about them, and acted upon them at our convenience, but we have never had to make them part of our deeper thinking. The fact is that we are focused here on wilderness tripping, on experiencing a kind of limitlessness nature that’s not that different from our unconscious belief in the limitlessness of resources – forests or clean water or energy.
I look at the meter one more time and decide not to start the generator this afternoon. The sun has been bright, and things will be fine until dinner time. I want to go fix those trailer lights, and there’s no need for the generator to run that long at this time of day.
I get my toolbox loaded in the boat, as well as a come-along to do some brute-force body repair. It’s a short run back over to the landing, and the wiring goes smoothly, though not quickly. Then I hook the come-along to a tree and use it to bend one of the trailer arms back into position. I’m not sure how any of this happened, but I can’t get too bothered by it. We are running this equipment under very hard conditions. It’s a little after five o’clock when I get done, and dinner is at 5:30.
The boat motor starts easily and kicks quietly into gear. I run off the dock slowly because I’m looking at the light on the lake and surrounding hills. There are cliffs that rise directly behind the camp and they are lit up now in the afternoon light. I motor to the other side of the lake so I can catch the view of Katahdin behind them. With the blue sky and white clouds, and the light casting long shadows into the craggy terrain of the Abol side of the mountain, it’s a stunning sight. I stop the motor and just drift for a while.
Returning to the beauty of this region has been a real gift this summer, but I have found complexities in this job that I hadn’t expected. The causal connections between this place and our homes in the south, or the forests of the north for that matter, are not linear or straight forward, but they are there, nonetheless. This was the part that I really didn’t understand when I walked through here eight years ago – that the trail traverses not only the history of this forest, but also the modern geography of resources and technology. If we are going to steward this forest into the future, we will have to see the connections between the macro and micro uses to which we put this land.
As if to emphasize all that, I hear the generator back at camp kick in. I guess I was overly optimistic in how much battery we had. The alarm must have gone off and the kitchen manager must have started it up. I should go check the fuel and make sure it’s running right. It will be running now for a few hours.
Mount Katahdin from the water.
