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The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library) Review"The Maine Woods" relates three separate trips Henry Thoreau made to the Mount Katahdin and Allagash Wilderness Waterway region of Maine At 29 years old in 1846, at 36 years old in 1853, and at 40 years old in 1857. In each of the stories he travels with a friend by rail, steamboat, and coach to the starting point, hires a guide, and embarks on his adventure. Even for a reader familiar with the region, it is essential to keep a map handy to follow the author in his travels. In the first trip he hires a local outfitter as a guide, and poles up the West Branch of the Penobscot River, across lakes and up streams, as close to Mt. Katahdin as he can get, then climbs to the summit of what the Indians called Ktaadn, or "highest land," and now called Mt. Katahdin. His route up the mountain approximated what we now know as the Abol trail, though with no trail to follow, his experience was very different from today's Abol daypacker. He summited on a cloudy day, and missed out on the breathtaking views, though he did get infected with the spiritual bug, and he waxes philosophical as he makes his way back down. Thoreau's enduring memory of the region is "the continuousness of the forest." Thanks to the generous 209,501 acre gift of one of Maine's Governors, Percival Baxter, that memory of Thoreau's is also likely to be yours.
By contrast, the second story is less adventurous, being a canoe-camping trip on Chesuncook and surrounding lakes. Thoreau ends the story reflecting on man's vulnerability in the wilderness, and prays that man will not become "civilized off the face of the earth." I take this trip to be fundamentally a reconnaissance for the third and most ambitious of his trips, titled "The Allagash and East Branch." He went to Maine this time intending to make the standard Allagash Wilderness Waterway trip that many of us plan and few ever make. He lets himself get talked out of it and into a considerably more difficult trip. He starts as with the Chesuncook trip, but carries on northward into Chamberlain, Eagle, Telos, and Webster Lakes, and through Webster Stream to Second Lake and Great Lake Matagamon. From there it's flat water down the East Branch of the Penobscot. The Webster Stream segment was basically a ten mile portage. Fortunately he had hired a most remarkable Indian Guide, Joe Polis. Polis took his homemade birch bark canoe down through the Webster Stream rapids alone, and Thoreau and his companion (whom he unaccountably never names), fought their way through the thick underbrush and the jumble of trees along the riverbank. In summary, he takes the West Branch upstream as far as it goes, traverses the high elevation lakes over to the headwaters of the East Branch, and completely circles the Katahdin massif in the process.
Thoreau does not consistently delight the reader with is craft; his creative spirit is intermittent. But when inspired, he rises to the task:
Referring to the logs which get hung up along the shore, waiting for a freshet to carry them down to the sawmill, he writes, "Methinks that must be where all my property lies, cast up on the rocks along some distant and unexplored stream, and waiting for an unheard of freshet to fetch it down."
And about the noises he hears at night, "When camping in such a wilderness as this, you are prepared to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which give voice to its wildness."
And his boatmen: "...so cool, so collected, so fertile in resources are they."
And anyone who has trod through the dark, damp woods between those lakes will recognize this: "It was impossible for us to discern the Indian's trail in the elastic moss, which like a thick carpet, covered every rock and fallen tree, as well as the earth.
And while experiencing one of the Allagash's classic thunderstorms: "I thought it must be a place where the thunder loved, where the lightning practiced to keep its hand in, and it would do no harm to shatter a few pines.
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