We woke at 3 a.m. to hot black coffee and a steady, 25 mph wind howling down the junction of the St. John and Allagash rivers. After loading the truck, we headed out for an hours-long, spine-jarring ride down logging roads. As I bounced around inside the cab, I thought about how I had been waiting nearly half my life to be here, the North Maine Woods, hunting moose.
I climbed stiffly out of the truck as the thermometer rose to 28 degrees, a temperature I rarely see anymore, having moved to Florida 17 years ago. After several close calls with fully loaded logging rigs whizzing past us in the dark at high speed on the dirt road, we were happy to be out of the truck. My guide Nate Desrosier turned to me and smiled.
“If the swamp doesn’t get you, the logging trucks will,” he said.
The terrain was a tangled mess of soggy bog and tightly packed fir, beech and maple trees.
