twelve thousand coyotes
Dreaming
Of moons
Unobscured by
the pillowy veil of
Clouds and murky star stuff
Denned down in an
Earthen shelter
Canopied by fallen
Pine trees that
Muffle the yipping
Of pups through the night
Twelve thousand coyotes
leaving only
Winter tracks
That tell stories of death
And
The steam that rises from carcasses left
limp on the summer’s roadway
These
ghosts of the forest
Heard hollering at autumn moons
the north country
Miracles of my wilderness dreams
I listen to their
Cries through stiff canvas walls
that bead with the
condensation of my breath
deer season
walking atop beds of fallen leaves crackling with crystalline frost I follow the trilling hymns of the woodcock to the spot where
fractals of broken light are seeping through the interstices of the barren trees
they are a madness in the bone-bleaching
squalls of the river basin
I am draped in orange
save for my woolen gorget, camera
and leather boots
I am not a hunter here for blood
I am a visitor to this acre of paradise
come to observe the north country beauties
of November
when I spot the sinewy shadows in the lee of the river corridor
heaving ungulates feeding on grasses
they are beyond my lens’s reach
so I retreat to the hinterland
a quiet sough
inhabited only by a family of swamp sparrows
and birch trees adorned with icicles
I watch rivulets of liquid starlight streaming down like diamonds
glad that I have found something at last to photograph
Greatest Mountain
This is not an elegy
This is a song about oceans
About basins formed by glaciers
The size of my sadness
This is a love letter
To the girl in the green corduroy dress
And the dog who barks at midnight
To the swampers wharfing
The side hills
And the herons bathing in dead water
The heroin addicts gone pallid
Putrid husks clinging to life
Like birch trees reamed of their sap
Eyes fixed on the tableland
The stars and salvation
Which comes only for the believers
And those who listen to folk songs
About eyes left hungry
From the stinging taste of dust
Who speak and fuck and live
Without preamble
The drunks and rivermen
The ones with sheepback hearts
Eroded by the frozen seas of madness
That connect them to the acres
Of heath that burn in the eyes
Of meadows
And
At long last beg for their soul’s redemption
Because paradise is A Clear Shining Lake
And god lives in every mountain ridge
And in the crevasse
She is the state bird of Wyoming
And
Wisconsin
And I feel her in Alaska
Where America dissipates into thin mist
Across the Bering Sea
And in the Gulf of Maine
At the day’s first sun
Home: Finding My Way in the North Woods | Part 1: Where I'm Coming From
HOME
Finding My Way in the Maine Woods
Part One - Where I’m Coming From
There is a town north of Bangor, east of Moosehead Lake, and 200 miles west of the Bay of Fundy, where great men went into the woods to make a life. Their wives lived with quiet, determined intention, and their children were reared beside a river engorged with timber and lakes bespeckled with rocky isles. These families built a life, a community out of the northern forests of snow and pine. They lived off the land because they had to, because prosperity loomed in the collective imagination of the community. But it was not ripe for the taking, it was a thing to be etched in hard stone like a sculpture, a promise seen only by those who knew their way in the woods. Like a birch bark canoe, it had to be coaxed from the hardwoods of the north country by men with skill and grit and a drive to go places that were unforgiving and wild. Those men were pioneers who turned their backs on the sea and the sun-weathered faces of their fathers, said goodbye to their mothers and the dreary coast, the fisheries and promises of a good life; or bid farewell to their mother countries like Italy and Lithuania, and followed the hallucinations of manifest destiny inland, to the Maine frontier. And there they built a city in the wilderness, the largest paper mill in the world, and churned out newsprint for publications like the New York Times. This town, named after an Abenaki word that means “land of many islands,” that sits on the West Branch of the Penobscot River, with its leafy gold that lays in the shadow of a great mountain, where tough men drove logs and felled trees the size of buildings, and made paper out of pulp... is still there, though long past its glory. It is called Millinocket, my people are from there, and today I call it home.
People that I love, love it here. They fit in. They drop their r’s and eat fiddlehead soup. They’ve mourned and wedded and grown up and then old here. They’ve sat in the pews, the grandstands, headed unions, hosted knitting groups and tupperware parties, and joined or started every organization that makes a person a bona fide local.
Today, the mill is gone and only rubble and emptiness occupy the space where the pride of Millinocket once stood. The last version of the mill left in 2008, but the dream of a day when the mill would again be up and running and return the town to paper-making splendor has died only recently. In my time as a resident I have felt the slow anguish of a dying thing fade into the cold nothingness of death. For more than a decade, the people of Millinocket have resisted the tides of change, balked at non-papermaking proposals, and languished in economic hardship exacerbated by the opioid crisis. There is a confounding ethos of anti-conservationism, something the locals refer to as “tree-hugging.” I feel like an outsider. And yet, these are my people. I want to know them. I want to know what they want for themselves, for their community, and for the wilderness just beyond their homes—the forests where our fathers’ fathers worked and lived and made a life for themselves; and where our fathers drove truck and built second homes after they got hired straight out of high school and “followed the window.” What are we to do with the acres of pine and hemlock and hardwoods that were to be our birthright, but that stand to this day steadfast in the face of climate change and the inexorable will of man to forge on— all while our dreams dissolve into dust?
This is not a love letter nor an appraisal of what is right or wrong about a place or a community. It is not a critique, nor could it be; I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know what it all means to me, but I find solace in examining the bonds between myself and the here and there. No matter how I feel about it, I come from here. But I came back for the woods.
Beyond the borders of town a brilliant expanse unfurls in all directions, blanketing the earth in summer’s green, autumn’s amber, and the soft cotton of winter snow. Just past the banks of the Penobscot River’s West Branch—in a far off country—the crown jewel of Maine rises from the wilderness. It is a special place that I love wholly and inexplicably, where men I admire found meaning in the formidable landscape and where I search for my own meaning among mountains and men.
Without ever having reached Katahdin’s peak, I knew I was in the presence of something special. The way the mountain materialized on the horizon, beyond a lee or muskeg and around every wooded corner of the backroads outside of town—was a gift; it was a thing that never got old, its majesty deserving of celebration. Katahdin’s crown seemed to hang from the sky like an ornament and changed color with the seasons or glowed different purplish hues with the cloudbursts of spring and early summer. It remains a monument in my life, both literal and abstract: it’s a wellspring of inspiration—the mountain and the wildernesses that skirt its base—and a vestige of my childhood; it’s a place on earth that scrapes the firmament, where I have always stored my aspirations, and a luminary, a symbol for what I care about: the land and its most vulnerable inhabitants. It is an idea, a gospel, a thing created in the image of god; it is a revelation. Man could never conquer nor make sense of it, only fight to preserve it and store it in our consciousness. The wilderness at its base is the altar upon which I worship; on Knife’s Edge I risk becoming a martyr, and in the waters of Chimney Pond, Katahdin Lake, and Wassataquoik Stream I am baptized. Fording the rapids of the West or Each Branch I pay my respect to past disciples, wild Bodhisattvas like Thoreau and Roosevelt; I can feel their presence and their reverence too. Their wilderness dreams are mine now, we store them in the clouds with the words of the man who made it happen, the one who decreed that this land remain “forever wild.”
I want to know myself and I never feel more rawly myself than when I am paddling or hiking or camping. In fact, just being in nature strips me down to who I essentially am; and being in this nature—the north Maine woods— makes me feel rooted, connected to a timeless throughline that is elemental to my personhood. Who I am in relation to the Maine woods is who I am as an individual, on the most basal and primal level; in the wild, the good and bad of my character are revealed. But I am not a hermit, the whole of my spiritual and psychological makeup cannot be deduced from the wilderness alone; I am a member of a family, a community, and a generation. MY generation, whether born and bred or interloper, has no memory of the good times, the prosperous years when Main Street had an opera house and teenagers could afford to buy their own homes. We may be few in numbers, but we carry the burden of ancestral trauma with an unentitled poise that I am genuinely proud of.
This essay and the ones that will follow are my attempt at probing the consciousness of a place, a people, and a landscape, so I may better understand what it means to be from Millinocket, of the north woods, and to see what remains of the noble lumbermen of our past. Is it only names, geography, and frostbitten skin we share with the strong men and women who built this town? Or is an inimitable desire to live and work in a place where most men couldn’t coded into our DNA? Who are these people? And how do I fit in?
Home: Finding My Way in the North Woods | Part 2: Mill Town
Part 2: Mill Town
^^^
I love nature.
Being in and around the wilderness makes me feel a razor-sharp closeness to my truest self, and to my spiritual antecedents like Percival Baxter, the visionary and namesake of Baxter State Park—a promise kept by Baxter when he vowed to keep Katahdin the mountain of the people of Maine. There were also lesser-known figures who roamed the valleys driving logs, felling trees, trapping fur, and making a way in the wild. Some of those obscure men who helped etch a society out of the forest and eked out a life for themselves and their families in the brutal north country were related to me by blood. Percival Baxter, I know, had an intense and enduring love for nature; he fought and paid to preserve Katahdin and the surrounding forests, and when it came time to write the parameters that would regulate the park in perpetuity, he couldn’t help but wax poetic when he decreed that the land “shall remain forever wild.” What I don’t know is how the men who worked the woods—and shared my family name—felt about the wilderness that took them from their families, reamed them of their blood and sweat and not infrequently ended their lives. Was it awe or agony they felt when they took to the woods?
Moving through groves of hemlock, spruce, and pine, beneath the green spires of the near wilderness feels— especially in the quiet cold of winter—like a journey to my self; the whole self, that contains the unbroken chain of wildness that lives in me and was borne of some ancient ancestor embarking on an overland odyssey to the fertile wilds of whatever continent he inhabited, searching for a food source and the raw materials necessary to build a life. And maybe it was he who passed along the love for mossy river rocks, the smell of fire spilling across the scarlet leaves of autumn, and high, open spaces that I inherited.
The relatives of my past who are not abstractions or the manifestation of my romanticized relationship to the snow covered earth were mill workers and mountain men. They were men of pride and little wealth, and so they went into the woods out of an abiding drive to provide for their families. My great-grandfather—a man who lived until I was in my mid twenties—started work at age twelve. His hands were thick and strong and he had knuckles like boulders. At only twelve years old he shoveled coal at the trainyard to support his mother. At sixteen he started work at the mill, but left after two years to join the Navy and fight in WWII. During that time the mill continued to run with the wives and daughters of the enlisted men making paper from trees that were in part provided by the prisoner of war lumber camps that contained German soldiers captured in North Africa. My great-grandfather, Atlee, never graduated from high school, but was a lifelong employee of the Great Northern Paper Company, and a union leader. His family lived comfortably in the quiet mill town that sits on the banks of the Penobscot; some of us still live there, though the mill remains whole only in the memory of those that saw it at its greatest. While Atlee’s biological father was a construction baron and alleged prohibition-era bootlegger with a taste for pinky rings and fur coats, the man who adopted him and raised him was a simple man whose life was filled with work and little else. He was among the mill’s first employees. Lloyd would tend his trap lines after an eight hour shift in the paper room, in the middle of the night, walking the entire distance with my great-grandfather by his side, and then the entire way back, with the two of them sharing the load of fox and beaver pelts, their footfalls penetrating the early morning silence as they found their way home in the dawnlight.
If my meanderings among the boreal forests of the Katahdin region don’t put me in closer touch with the countrymen who shared my DNA then I think it is because of the nature of work. Recreation feels like a modern luxury, one that my grandfathers wouldn’t understand. Hiking, camping, kayaking, photographing birds perched atop snags, and sitting on the dirt shaded by clouds and canopy contemplating life would have seemed a peculiar waste of time. Thoreau, who was built of relatively feeble constitution, was scared out of his wits by the ruggedness of Katahdin, and said of the barrel chested men who dwelt at its base “ the mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.” They did what they had to. And although I have no family who relies on my labor to eat or be sheltered, and I have a combined two hours of experience with axe swinging, I feel a primal urge to build with my hands something that would make the great men of my past proud. And I will. But right now I am focused on telling their stories and the stories of the town they founded and grew so that I can help in the resuscitation of its spirit and vitality.
^^^
The mill is gone.
In the final days of July my grandmother and I drove on logging roads and snowmobile trails and trespassed on private land in search of the best spot to view the back of the former mill site. It was hot and dry and a soft grey haze from the wildfires in western Canada hung in the air and fed dim rays of light into the river valley. More than once we were stymied by impassable windthrown trees; moose tracks criss-crossed the roads and I expected to see one around every turn, but we never did. From the closest disused logging road, my grandmother—a humble, brawny,broad-shouldered woman who walks slow and with a slight hitch in her gait—hiked alongside me down to the spot on the river directly across from the old mill, following the sound of the river spilling over the dam. We wanted to get to the backside because it reveals the truth about what remains of the mill. To the cars driving down main street the mill could seem only shuttered, not destroyed. There is a Potemkin structure that faces the town and makes the former mill seem whole, but it is an illusion. Though the skyline looks the same, the town’s pride has been gutted from the back. I once looked at the chimney stacks leaking foamy steam across a canvas of sky as monuments to my ancestral roots. Standing on the banks of Penobscot’s West Branch, staring into the ruins behind the facade, absorbing the carnage with my grandmother—a native daughter—it felt like we had uncovered a hidden desecration of a once holy place. And maneuvering the logging roads on the way back I noticed numerous patches of new growth lining the road in perfect rows. The paper company planted seeds after cutting; they took the old growth that was provided by the land and they at least replenished the soil and had an eye toward the future. I wish they had done the same for the town and its people.
^^^
The community is broken.
The feeling of being witness to something’s end sits heavy over the town like a cloud of smoke. This town is filled with ghosts. When my grandmother was a young girl, the town was a charming place where success and stability were attainable for everyone. Today the town is ailing from a lingering opioid epidemic and the detritus of late-stage capitalism has clogged our main street. Most of the young people with the means to flee have, and what is left is an aging population too old to work... and the rest of us. It can feel at times like the town of the past was a dream, that what we are are vaguely similar strangers chained by circumstance to the same carcass; we tread upon the same dirt and our personal vicissitudes read like slant rhymes in the bygone manifesto of the American dream, but most notions of being in this together were left to die when the mill bailed, and the recent political climate was the final, lethal dose. Rather than weep for the great loss at the heart of it all, I take to the woods and summon the essence of my forebears by walking through spaces they once occupied, through fields and forests they influenced with their physical might. I want to connect to my past, in part, because I want to be brought closer to the people who are now my neighbors.
I think about the winters of my childhood when the snowdrifts touched the eaves and I would pluck six foot icicles off the porch and bat them at trees to watch them shatter like frigid glass. There always seemed to be an exchanging of tupperware and casserole dishes between my mom and our family and friends. The house smelled of slow-cooked meats and we ate sticky, starchy meals throughout the day. On weekends we would drive the snow sleds to the various clubs and wilderness camps–—the East Branch Sno-Rovers and The White House Landing. There was always hot cocoa, beans, and slow-cooked game of moose, venison, and bear. The adults would huddle around each other drinking booze and eating hot food and talking with their snow suits still on. I remember the smell of gasoline and cigarettes and the sound of revving engines behind human chatter. This was the thing to do, to quell the anxious pangs of cabin-fever, and to feed and be fed by your neighbor.
There is a comradeship that comes with sharing the experience of winter in the rural north woods. The wicked cold is more easily endured as a community. Handled together, the indignities of poverty are diminished and transformed into the foundations and fodder of communion. As northerners, Mainers, and the remaining progeny of this former boom-town, we have the stuff we need to return our region to glory; it is coded into our being from generations of men and women who survived the savage privations of the lean times and built a magic city that sat on the shores of the Penobscot River and the vanguard of industry. It is our duty to access the tools they gave us—wildness, humility, a high tolerance for suffering, and whatever sorcery gives us the ability to feed a family of five with a single can of tuna—and to use them to build a new way of life here. We have to search for the remnants of our past that we can build upon and also preserve the things we cannot afford to lose.
River
I thought about you today
A maelstrom of lonely
Stirred beneath my bones
And I remembered that
most
Of my life was lived
near the river
So maybe the river is
My companion
I thought about the day
Emily and I walked
Along the waterfront
Still December,
When I lost you.
Sheets of frozen ice
Crashing into themselves
Sounds of broken glass
Made me think about
The moment your tumor
Burst.
And did it make a sound.
The river of sick inside you.
Blistering masses of the Penobscot
Raging against themselves
I thought about your eyes,
Like autumn bonfires
And wished the river
Would carry them to
Me.
The High Place
How many winters gone
And how many remain?
I’ve seen seedlings
Grow to be masts of great ships
Felled by men with rum-warmed
Bellies
Into gentle beds of
Evergreen boughs
How many more times
Will the tamarack fade into
A golden amber bouquet
That reminds me of the many
Sorrows of being
Intensified in my
Wilderness dreams
Like a cathedral of light
How many moons
To the deep valley stream,
To earth’s bottom
The only place I believe
I’ll see you again
The Smoldering Valley
There is a point in the Penobscot River where the East and West Branches converge. Just south of Medway the falls from Hathaway Farm settle into gentle eddies and shallow pools that smell like the fish that live there. On humid mornings in July and August the valley is alive with birdsong and moose are seen haunting the riverbanks in a drunken stupor brought about by ticks and black flies. On a restless morning this past July I put Pop’s aluminum Old Town in at the base of the falls and fished the outer currents for bass and drank beer. This was one of the few things Pop and I enjoyed doing together and normally it cools the tubes on nervy summer days when bottle rockets and pyrotechnics pollute the sky—and the station floods my radio with work calls. But that morning the beer hit quick and I must have been lulled into a trance by the boat quivering in the slow, undulating rapids, because I didn’t see the rock until it collided with Pop’s boat. It sounded like a shotgun blast. The bow of the boat passing across the white light of the sun was the last thing I remember seeing before I was submerged, wrestling the riverbed and trying to find the surface in the sepia waters.
I emerged from the Penobscot in a violent fury, slick with blood and sputtering river water like it was ectoplasm. Groping for anything solid, I thrust my concussed head skyward to the smattering of clouds above me, yanking at reeds and rocks, cutting my stomach on the craggy shore, convulsing like a fish on a frozen lake. I crawled across unfamiliar earth to a point of light in a nearby glade and fell still when my body was awash in sunlight. And then: nothing.
After a dizzying eternity I awakened to myself and the wilderness. The first thing I noticed was the smell of rust—the stench of dried blood and river muck caked along the ears. My mouth tasted like beer and blood. The heat was thick in the air and disorting, like looking at the world through a thick pane of glass. I heard furtive splashing over the sound of the rapids. Across the river was a bull moose feeding and bathing. He looked almost approachable standing to his chest in the river, chewing listlessly on nutgrass— unaware of me or my accident. His antlers looked like the underside of a fallen tree; though the color of rich soil, they somehow reflected sunlight and made it dance on the water—a shimmery gold. I sat and watched him for a long time. The clouds swelled and passed in opaque bursts. Eventually, so much time passed that my clothes were nearly dry of water and blood, and still I remained, watching the lethargic movements of a giant. I was in awe as I watched the colossal moose stride through the water with a lazy elegance. I wanted to see him swim, to ford the river and stalk me like Pop and I used to stalk the late autumn forests of the north woods for game. Time was nothing to me, then or now. The moose had total dominion over this holy acre and I was beautifully invisible. I was utterly drunk and hadn’t a single drop of beer left in me. With the sound of breaking bones, Pop’s canoe dislodged from the grip of rocks and tree limbs and cascaded downriver, startling the moose into the dusky stand of hemlocks, each one dimpled with notches that looked like hollowed out eye sockets.
Later that evening I was sitting on my porch smoking a cigarette and drinking away my headache when I heard the call come over the radio. An errant fireworks display torched the campground one mile north of the spot where my boat capsized. The stand of old hemlocks where I watched the moose disappear into the firmament were giant matchsticks waiting to ignite. I hopped in my pickup and raced up route eleven to Grindstone. I knew I was close when the smoke turned my throat to sand. I stood on the banks of the Penobscot—where the East and West Branches meet—and watched the flames move through the understory, spitting embers into the sky. As I unloaded gear from the back of my truck I thought about that old bull moose whose morning routine I had bore witness to, and wondered if he made it to safe ground. I watched the flames drive through the trees scorching them bare, hoping the cinders flickering in the twilight were not the moose’s burned up flesh. I knew that heaps of ashen dust would be swept up in the wind and blown across the landscape like a gasping breath and would settle on some distant forest floor. And the following autumn I would take Pop’s boat out to the clearing where I laid with a bloody head and I would forage for mushrooms among the charred birch trees—walking slowly and quietly, keeping an eye out for that moose. I’d walk the shores of the still smoldering river valley and listen to the wind play songs of my childhood—happy to be back home in the wild. I would strip down to my skivvies and wade into the unceasing torrent of the Penobscot, hands outstretched like antlers.
It’s Back: the McRib
Last year sucked. For anybody who isn’t a billionaire trying to colonize Mars, last year was filled with dread, fear, loss and painful reckonings. On more than one occasion I sat in the parking lot of a Walmart watching the multitudes of raw humanity spill into the lot like a faucet dumping poisonous water, while the interior of the store was filling up like a noxious basin of viral chemicals. Donning a mask my grandmother knit me, I'd buzz around the store with a trembling gait, navigating the aisles with an alien energy. I imagine we looked like bacteria under a microscope, crazed shoppers swimming round the petri dish searching for toilet paper during a plague that primarily afflicts the lungs. The choice of whether or not to shop at Walmart and put myself and my family at risk never got easier even as the state of my finances got worse. And for those of us on the side of sanity, the aisles were the front lines of a battle against a deadly virus and a culture war that is sure to leave our democracy gasping for breath.
On a personal note, I suffered the greatest tragedy of my life last year. My most consistent and loving, life-affirming companion succumbed to a disease nobody knew he had, and died unexpectedly after over nine years together. The grief from losing my dog was this kind of transcendent drug. I felt like an open wound, but it made me fearless. It made me think that suffering on that level, where the illusions of the world shatter like a stained glass window, was part of the process of self-actualization; that loss changes you, but it doesn’t actually empty you, it weirdly makes you whole. It was as if there was a room in the palace of my mind that I never knew about. Drugs and booze and childhood trauma suppressed the room, obscured it with a filmy plaque. Meditation, Zoloft and cognitive behavioral therapy chipped away at the plaque over time. The icey walls of the room were slowly melting and eventually the room would have appeared to me. But in the same way the virus put its boot on the throat of an already ailing society, the death of my dog expedited what was already in process; it excavated the room from the depths of my psyche and gave me back something I only ever had when I was naive enough to not realize I shouldn’t have it: optimism. It’s back, I thought. All of the sudden I could see more than three days into the future. It felt as if for the first time in my life the whole of my frontal lobe had come online. I saw that I had values, passions, skills, and a future that might actually make sense.
There are three reasons I feel the warm joy of optimism in my cheeks like the buzz from a cheap red wine: the pandemic, my dead dog, and the McRib. My entire fucked up life has been defined by chaos and anxiety so I suppose it makes sense that when the human race started experiencing what I endure in my body daily, I was released from the prison of self-consciousness. And something about my four-legged avatar—the uninhibited, aspirational, purest version of me— that contained all of my heaviest emotions vanishing from existence burned me up quick and hot like a brush fire—but it too set me free. I can feel the new-growth greenery sprouting inside of me, breaching the charred soil of self and emerging as something new. Ordinarily I’d feel guilty about clinging to personal optimism while the world around me devolves into madness; or I’d feel self-pity that at the exact moment I am ready to succeed in the world... the world is shuttered, on its knees and bleeding out. But I know that everything will be ok, that America will once again be a beacon of exceptionalism, a moral lodestar on the world stage, and the triumphant hegemonic superpower we tell ourselves we already are. I know because we have made one glorious, bold, epic achievement during this pandemic: we brought back the McRib. The disgusting, glistening, gelatinous pork goo that symbolizes a uniquely American brand of capitalist prowess— whose intermittent existence has emerged like a horn in the fog—is back and here to bolster our faith in America’s ability to persevere. It’s back and we’re going to be ok! I hope...
Spring
Laying in the long grass
I am on the frontier!
Thumbing my way
Through the old growth forest
On the banks of the Allagash
The whisper of the wind
Feels like an ocean
I spot a cloud shaped
Like the old homestead
I am lost
In the North Country
Swarmed in a psychosis of black flies
The dark woods
Are a symphony of bats
The earth is alive
With the scent of the ancient pines
Their needles are my home now
At the Jubilee; Or a Note to Percival Baxter
Without ever having reached Katahdin’s peak, I knew I was in the presence of something special. The way the mountain materialized on the horizon, beyond a lee or muskeg and around every wooded corner of the backroads of the small town where I grew up —was a gift; it was a thing that never got old. Katahdin’s crown seemed to hang from the sky like an ornament and changed color with the seasons or glowed different purplish hues with the cloudbursts of spring and early summer. It remains a monument in my life, both literal and abstract: it’s a wellspring for inspiration—the mountain and the wildernesses that skirt it— and a vestige of my childhood; it's a place on earth that scrapes the firmament, where I have always stored my aspirations, and a luminary, a symbol for what I care about: the land and its most vulnerable inhabitants. It is an idea, a gospel, a thing created in the image of god; it is a revelation. Man could never conquer nor make sense of it, only fight to preserve it and store it in our consciousness. The wilderness at its base is the altar upon which I worship; on the Knife Edge I risk becoming a martyr, and in the waters of Chimney Pond, Katahdin Lake, and Wassataquoik I am baptized. Fording the rapids of the East Branch I pay my respects to past disciples, wild Bodhisattvas like Thoreau and Roosevelt; I can feel their presence and their reverence too. Their wilderness dreams are mine now, we store them in the clouds with the words of the man who made it happen, the one who decreed that this land remain “forever wild.”
Katahdin
It’s May now in Maine, which usually means Spring, petrichor, songbirds, and snowmelt coursing beneath rock and earth. It means frigid hikes on trails blocked by fallen trees- stripped naked by the wicked months of January and February. It means the restlessness that brings me on drives up familiar roads flanked by birch trees bent like parentheses; each drive bringing me farther into the woods as the snow recedes out of sight. And it seems, out of memory. It’s May now in Maine, and those things are still true, though barely noticeable behind the pall of a global pandemic.
As John Muir said “nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.” My particular afflictions -- anxiety, boredom -- have been amplified inestimably by the pandemic. The momentum of the changing seasons cannot be slowed by the spread of the virus, and neither can my enthusiasm to get into the backcountry. I wanted to be near the mountain, to feel the escapism of drifting into the timelessness of the wild. Instead came the recent news that Baxter State Park would be closed until July, and with it the crushing realization that I’d be forced to cancel my season-opening camping trip, and take day trips below the tree line.
There are many uncanny differences between this Spring and Springs of the past- differences you cannot escape no matter how far into the woods you go. In the park the evidence is everywhere. Yes, volatile weather conditions often delay the opening of certain trails or even the entire park this time of year, but there is a palpable stillness now, like a vacant movie set or a ghost town from the old west. I half-expected to see a tumbleweed galumphing down the tote road. The Park’s visitor center is shuttered, facilities locked up. The website displays a ticker with font and colors that imply foreboding. There’s the empty Ranger truck being used now as a receptacle for winter signage. The closed gate at the entrance and downed tree left unattended in the parking area are less than inviting. Then there’s me and my new behaviors: sanitizing my hands after using the pencil at the registration box. The casual trail etiquette that has been replaced by the dread of meeting a fellow hiker on the trail and exchanging hurried pleasantries behind a bandana pressed against my face. And the new thoughts: Do the animals know? The trees? Can the forest sense my fear the same way I can feel the leaves surge with the wind?
Typically, my time in nature forces me to consider things both small and large at the same time: the immediacy of honking geese and the complexity of their migration patterns, their inscrutable instincts. My hikes fix my awareness on the concrete and the abstract of the wilderness. This has not been my experience since the spread of the virus. On my recent trips into the woods I struggled to grasp the dichotomy of an intimidating, robust landscape, which is also part of a sensitive ecological system. A system that when standing beneath a 100 year old, 100 foot tall whie pine, feels infallible, but is in grave danger because of our human influence. This became easier to understand recently when I returned home to several inches of May snow blanketing the boughs of evergreens, and watched as the waterfowl that had made a home in the boggy pasture behind my house were forced out by the fickle whims of Maine climate, and something called the Polar Vortex.
A man walks alone in the woods, what is he looking for? I’ve had this refrain stuck in my head, as a kind of prompt, on my post-virus outings. I have no good answer. Is it solace or solitude? An escape from the horrors of a diseased society? Maybe. And maybe the forest is medicine. I have felt a kind of existential sickness over a dislocation from the natural world. And if the forest is medicine, then Katahdin is a monument to good health - a beacon of aliveness, and light. The mountain has been a spiritual stalwart for thousands of years, from the native people who deified it, to the adventurers who conquered it, to the writers and artists who immortalized it, and the conservationists who helped preserve it. For me, mostly, it was the aesthetic backdrop to my early childhood. It didn’t become a source of curiosity, pride, or importance until very recently when my interests in self-reliance and self-discovery pushed me into the woods to experience for myself what I had only read about.
I have over my lifetime engaged with the mountain, but as art or idea, never in a physical sense. My family has for generations lived in sight of Katahdin and I feel something bizarrely akin to birthright when I see it- though I know better. When my mother was growing up her mother would make her wear a snowsuit until the snow was totally off of the mountain. Now, I have a yearly bet with that grandmother - borne out of that horrifying tale of my mother’s childhood - about the date the snow will disappear fully from Katahdin’s peak. Every year we have the kayaks in the alpine ponds at the mountain’s foot long before the snow is gone. As I write this I am sitting beneath a black and white photo of the mountain’s Great Basin. It was taken by my great-great uncle for the Great Northern Paper Company, and if my house was suddenly ablaze, it would be the first thing I’d grab.
I am twenty-nine years old, the same age Thoreau was when he first climbed Katahdin. I don’t know why exactly, but that fact seemed important to me when I first discovered it. I planned (and still do) to climb the mountain several times this summer with Thoreau in mind. I’m hoping he can help me glean from the mountain the kind of wisdom I might need entering my thirties in times such as these. I know well the feeling of triumph over unsettling thoughts and emotions. I have not experienced the kind of victory that comes from exceeding the perceived limitations of my own body. I want to explore the boundaries both within and without myself, and I know the mountain exists somewhere on those boundaries. I don’t know if I’m handling this crisis well now, or if I’ll get any better or worse as the summer rolls inexorably on. I know that I find myself clinging to books by people with names like Leopold, Emerson, and Muir. The ones who opened my eyes to what Thoreau called “the tonic of wildness.” I know that I wake every morning with the urge to be outside and to see Katahdin flourishing in the sky. I need it. I don’t know what strangeness July and August will bring, but I hope I can stand atop the mountain’s peak and that I can feel okay about things, if only for a while.
Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak I used to think of the mountain as a metaphor for various principles of my mindfulness practice. I’d think of a time-lapse video of clouds passing by the peak while the mountain sat in quiet observation, grounded, unperturbed. Now I think of the clouds not as ephemeral thoughts, but as the collective societal turmoil of our present and near-future. And it gives me comfort in knowing that Katahdin - that greatest mountain - will be standing serene, and unfazed through it all.
Northern Lights
It was after midnight
and we drove the Golden Road into blackness.
We stood on a bridge that swayed with the weight of us
and Katahdin was a faint purple shadow in the dark expanse
that we could only see because we knew it was there.
The Penobscot moved invisibly beneath our feet
and my knees wobbled
while I stared at the stars and willed my eyes to adjust.
I couldn’t see you in the night, but I felt your presence
and our whispers cut through the humid air like dim streams of light.
The sky was like any other Northern sky
until it exploded in bursts of green rivers
spilling across the stars.
We searched the celestial wilderness for silent flashes of astonishing light—
two morsels of carbon flesh suspended above running water,
aching in the way you ache when something is too big to comprehend.
My ears were bursting with the sound of your heart beats
and the entire universe felt like a darkened room
that could barely fit us.
I clenched the railing and tried to forget
that we are floating through space
And I thought about the moths
with wings like phosphorescent hickory
resting in the eaves
hoping for a new moon.