Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled Land

The Maine Woods, vast and largely unsettled, are often described as unchanged since Henry David Thoreau's journeys across the backcountry, in spite of the realities of Indian dispossession and the visible signs of logging, settlement, tourism, and real estate development. In the summer of 2014 scholars, activists, members of the Penobscot Nation, and other individuals retraced Thoreau's route.

Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later.

Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781613766651

Book preview

Rediscovering the Maine Woods

Rediscovering the Maine Woods

Thoreau’s Legacy in an Unsettled Land

edited by

John J. Kucich

University of Massachusetts Press

Amherst and Boston

Copyright © 2019 by University of Massachusetts Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-61376-665-1

Cover design by Frank Gutbrod

Cover photo by Andrew Montgomery/Unsplash.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kucich, John, editor.

Title: Rediscovering the Maine woods : Thoreau’s legacy in an unsettled land

/ edited by John J. Kucich.

Description: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2019] | Includes

bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018051561 (print) | LCCN 2018057856 (ebook) | ISBN

9781613766644 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613766651 (ebook) | ISBN 9781625344168

(hardcover) | ISBN 9781625344175 (paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Piscataquis County (Me.)—Description and travel. |

Maine—Description and travel. | Wilderness areas—Maine. | Forest

ecology—Maine. | Maine—Environmental conditions. | Thoreau, Henry David,

1817–1862—Travel—Maine. | Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Influence. |

Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. Maine woods. | Indians of North

America—Maine. | Human ecology—Maine.

Classification: LCC F27.P5 (ebook) | LCC F27.P5 R43 2019 (print) | DDC

974.1/2504—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051561

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

To Mike Wilson,

for bringing us together in the service of the Maine Woods,

and to the members of the Penobscot Nation,

for welcoming us to their home.

Wə̀liwəni.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Rediscovering the Maine Woods

John J. Kucich

Part one: Tracing a Landscape

Chapter 1

Crossing Moosehead Lake

Chris Sockalexis

Chapter 2

Undercurrents

Stan Tag

Chapter 3

The Maine Woods Rhomboid

Robert M. Thorson

Part two: Maine’s Thoreau

Chapter 4

Some Star’s Surface: Thoreau in the Maine Woods

Laura Dassow Walls

Chapter 5

Sublime Matter: Materiality and Language in Thoreau’s Ktaadn

Melissa Sexton

Chapter 6

Eating Moose: Thoreau, Regional Cuisine, and National Identity

Kathryn Cornell Dolan

Part three: Between Wilderness and Working Forest

Chapter 7

Pilgrimages and Working Forests: Envisioning the Commons in The Maine Woods

James S. Finley

Chapter 8

Multiple Use and Its Discontents: Popular Conservation Writing in the Maine Woods a Century after Thoreau

Dale Potts

Chapter 9

Thoreau’s Maine Woods and the Problem of Wildness

Richard W. Judd

Conclusion

Carrying Place: Penobscot Language, Land, and Memory

James Francis

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Members of the Penobscot Nation have been guiding visitors through their homeland for centuries, and we are grateful to the many members of the tribe who continue to share their deep knowledge of these woods and waters: James Francis, Chris Sockalexis, Charlie Brown, Jennifer Neptune, Jason Pardilla, Yeshe Parks, Gabriel Paul, and the many others who welcomed us into their circle.

While a few members of the Thoreau-Wabanaki Anniversary Tour contributed essays to this volume, many other participants shared their experiences and insights in ways that helped all of us deepen our understanding of the Maine Woods. Thoreau scholar Ron Hoag, forest historian Jamie Lewis, Katahdin Woods and Waters advocate Lucas St. Clair, Plum Creek representative Mark Doty, Appalachian Mountain Club manager Shannon LeRoy, photographers Jarrod McCabe and Dom Casserly, and the many others who helped document and publicize the tour—all contributed to what was a profoundly collaborative engagement with the Maine Woods.

A canoe trip and a collection of scholarly essays, of course, are quite different things, and this project owes a deep debt to many members of the academic community. Kristen Case helped to gather the Thoreau scholars who contributed to this volume; Rochelle Johnson and William Rossi offered invaluable feedback on the manuscript. We are grateful to Paul Johnson of Maine Woods Forever for permission to use the Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail map and to Renee Williams of the Concord Free Library for making Thoreau’s map of Maine available. And we are deeply grateful to Brian Halley of the University of Massachusetts Press for seeing this project through.

Finally, I am grateful to my family, Monica, Alexander, and Christopher, my most faithful companions and guides.

Rediscovering the Maine Woods

Introduction

Rediscovering the Maine Woods

John J. Kucich

Standing atop Mount Katahdin some years ago, the scholar Stan Tag overheard an illuminating comment from a fellow hiker: Didn’t you know? Thoreau invented Maine. This collection of essays offers a response to that comment. No writer is more associated with this region than Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, of course, didn’t invent Maine any more than he invented Walden Pond or civil disobedience, but as the three essays collected in the volume The Maine Woods (1864) show, he was fascinated by this land a day’s travel by railroad and steamer from his beloved Concord but a world away from the home he knew so well. Those essays—Ktaadn (1848), Chesuncook (1858), and The Allegash and East Branch (1864)—trace a writer compelled to understand a part of the world he found in turn beautiful and terrifying, familiar and otherworldly. He was fascinated, and he turned everywhere to learn more about it—poring over books and maps, talking with settlers and loggers and businessmen and hunters, seeking out, and slowly coming to understand, Penobscot people who had lived on this land since the glacier retreated from the sea’s edge. And if Thoreau did help invent this region, it was a Maine Woods caught in the tug and pull of the many forces that continue to shape it—and shape the larger country of which it is a part—to this day. For Thoreau, and for us, the Maine Woods are many things. An anchor of the great Northern Forest, a rich boreal ecosystem that teems with life. A working forest that supplies a global market in wood products. Hunting grounds and storied fishing spots. A wilderness retreat. A home. This territory, vast and largely unsettled, is often described as unchanged since Thoreau’s day, since the days when the first whites threaded its rivers in Wabanaki canoes, even as observers mark the vast changes that have swept the region—tides of Indian dispossession, lumbering, settlement, tourism, paper making, wilderness reclamation, and real estate development. Thoreau didn’t invent any of these forces, though he caught them at a certain stage in their history. He offered his own reasons for heading into the woods, and he lent a coherence to an area defined by Indian Island to south, Moose-head Lake to the west, the Allagash River to the north, and the Penobscot River to the east, with mighty Katahdin at its center. His writings gave it a place in the American imagination it has held ever since.

The Maine Woods have changed since Thoreau’s time, but the issues and the tensions that shape the region still follow the rough contours Thoreau sketched a century and a half ago. Where do the Maine Woods fit into the larger social and economic patterns that shape American life? What drives people to come to this region and leave their mark on the land? How does the land leave its mark on the people who come here? How do we understand the Maine Woods as a unique and uniquely powerful place? As with any place, that depends on how we see it. From one perspective, it is a distinct region shaped by geological and biological forces, part of the great Northern Forest that stretches to Great Lakes. It is also a landscape defined by iconic mountains, lakes, rivers, and animals. Names like Katahdin, Chesuncook, and the Allagash summon far more than points on map, and animals like the moose or the loon are both elements of a rich ecosystem and icons of a mythic world. The Maine Woods are part of a larger American story about our relationship to the natural world; they are also at once an engine of economic development and a pristine wilderness under threat from the modern world. We have much to learn from these varying perspectives—from the Wabanaki people who have adapted to the modern world and still maintain a profound connection to this land, from the artists and writers drawn to this landscape, and from settlers and entrepreneurs from across the world who’ve learned—and relearned—how to make a living from its resources.

These questions are as resonant in our era as they were in Thoreau’s, and we learn a great deal about both periods by putting them in close conversation with each other. Thoreau’s writings offer, as well, a focus and energy to these questions. His writings still move people. They generate insights that help us all see this landscape—and our many connections to it—in sharper detail. Many other writers, of course, have explored their own connections to this land, sometimes expressly following in Thoreau’s footsteps, sometimes approaching the area from very different perspectives. All, however, have engaged in the long conversation about what the Maine Woods mean. This volume brings that conversation into focus, putting some of the many voices that shaped the Maine Woods in the past into dialogue with some of the many people working to reshape their future. The result is not, of course, one answer—the Maine Woods are too rich, diverse, and storied to be understood with a simple formula. But what emerges from this conversation is a sense of the Maine Woods not as a place apart, cast in amber and insulated from the modern world, but rather as a region that has taken shape in a complex relationship with the people whose lives are tied to its woods and waters. The future this volume imagines, then, is not one of new resources and markets, nor one of fenced-off preserves—both paths that assume an essential difference between humans and their environment. Instead, a careful look at the region’s past points toward a future of reciprocity between the Maine Woods and the people who are part of its world. This long conversation about the meaning of the Maine Woods, we argue, tends toward a more richly imagined relationship between land and people whose success is measured by the health of the whole community. And to build these connections, we need to better understand both the Maine Woods themselves and the stories that shape their meaning.

A River Journey

This collection has its origins, as so many accounts of the Maine Woods do, in a canoe trip. The Thoreau-Wabanaki Anniversary Tour, organized in 2014 by Mike Wilson of the Northern Forest Center, brought together some of the many people deeply interested in reimagining the Maine Woods today by retracing Thoreau’s journey in 1857 with his Penobscot guide Joe Polis. The trip was timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Maine Woods in 1864, two years after Thoreau’s death. Guides, landowners, developers, activists, and scholars joined members of the Penobscot Nation eager to lead us through their tribal homeland. I had read and written about the Maine Woods for years, and visited a few parts of it, but this experience—to retrace Thoreau’s journey and think deeply about what it means for a land and the many people who share it—was something entirely new. We paddled and portaged and camped, sharing our stories and experiences along the way. Thoreau’s book proved a powerful touchstone for everyone. We all knew of it, even if we hadn’t all read it cover to cover, and it had clearly seeped into the water. A homemade sticker on a gear box read Powered by Thoreau, and his name sprang up at several sites along the journey. We all saw the river and land in part through his eyes, comparing this lake, that carry, or this stretch of river to his descriptions a century and a half before. Much hadn’t changed, and while the future Thoreau imagined on his journeys is now largely behind us, his vision of this land—as working forest and wilderness, as a community and a place for recreation—is amazingly intact. We invoked him regularly throughout the day, and at night we summoned his spirit more formally, gathering to read and reflect on his writings, sharing passages as we felt moved. We let the words sift through our own experiences, our own distinct senses of the world.

What made this trip so powerful—and so rich—was the sheer variety of ways Thoreau helped us develop our own sense of place. I’ve spent most of my professional life talking about Thoreau with students in English classes and with other English professors. In those settings, our Thoreau is a writer. Reading The Maine Woods in the Maine Woods, it became clear that he was many other things as well. A botanist and ornithologist. A neophyte woodsman, learning to make his way through the landscape under veteran guides. A precursor to the systematic studies of forests that emerged after his death and a counterpart to George Perkins Marsh. An early and eloquent advocate of national parks. A spokesman for simplicity and a guide out of the quiet desperation of a convention-bound life. For all of us, Thoreau gave expression to a landscape we had come to deeply love.

One member of our group had been put off by the many derogatory comments Thoreau makes about Indians, especially in Ktaadn, and I wasn’t quite as sure what Thoreau meant to our Penobscot hosts. One of the first things I learned from them was that the scholar whose work had introduced me to Penobscot culture was not universally admired by the tribe. And here I was, yet another outsider inserting myself into a landscape that had been Penobscot territory for thousands and thousands of years. Yet our hosts couldn’t have been more welcoming, and they were unfailingly generous in sharing their own sense of this place. As our group finished the long circle around Katahdin, it retraced not just the history of Thoreau’s journey, and not just the long history of Penobscot tenure on the land. It retraced, for the members of the tribe, a deeply personal history as well—of moose hunts with elders, trips to tribal land recently reclaimed, and, on our last night, of summers spent at a youth camp, long unused, on Sugar Island, where the kids would pack themselves six or eight into a lean-to after a day of swimming in water that had traced its own circuit through the Penobscot world. We all had been young once, too, and camped and swum in rivers or lakes that were clear and bright and were forever renewed. People should come here more often, one of our hosts said, and here we were.

Two ideas about the Maine Woods came into focus during the trip. The first is the power of thinking like a river, to adapt a phrase from Aldo Leopold. The great treasure of this place is the Penobscot River itself, a living spirit that is at once the beating heart of the land and the blood that flows through every part of its body. A journey up to a river’s sources in the highlands and then down toward the coast has a feeling of completion, of totality, of seeing where things begin and end, returning us to the ocean at last. To be borne downstream on water that had wreathed Katahdin’s summit in cloud a few days or weeks before was to understand that our journey retraced the cycle that has driven life on this watershed since humans first followed the glacier’s melting edge. We floated on the liquid materiality of the world, on time, and timelessness. All of us did—the river, the trees, the moose lurking in the woods, the eagles soaring above us, and the people moving through this landscape they only partially shaped, all floated on the passage of water through this place, a thin ribbon of life between bedrock and sky.

Thoreau glimpsed this, too—better and better over the course of his three essays. It’s only when he grasps this unity that Thoreau can really understand how his Penobscot guides, Joe Attean and Joe Polis, navigate the Maine Woods. This sense of the organic totality of a region is the second idea that came into focus. Thoreau is surprised that Attean and Polis can’t really tell him how they find their way, though they can list some of the many methods they use—tracking footsteps, listening for faint echoes that signify open water, looking at moss and tree branches to find north, too many, indeed, to give conscious attention to any one. Thoreau recognizes that what is commonly called instinct . . . is a sharpened and educated sense and that rather than carry maps, the Native relies on himself at the moment. That last phrase is telling. It’s akin to Walden’s liv[ing] deliberately but with an important difference.¹ Rather than stripping away the extraneous social accretions that interfere with living, it means integrating seamlessly all the knowledge and experience of a given place. Attean and Polis navigate the Maine Woods by fully inhabiting the Penobscot world. And as we learned from our Penobscot hosts on our trip, this world includes not just tribal lore and family memory but also maps old and new, GPS and iPhones, and even the odd nineteenth-century poet-naturalist. The Maine Woods are, in a word, alive, and by traveling through their waters, experiencing the rich interplay of natural environment and human memory, we learned to find our way, too.

The Maine Woods and the American Environment

Our journey through the Maine Woods was an opportunity to rethink our relationship to place—to this very particular world of river, forest, mountain, and village, and to place in general. While every community in every generation does this, Maine in the early years of the twenty-first century is a particularly good spot to do so. For one, the region, despite its long history of human presence and its shorter history of intensive forestry, remains remarkably intact as an ecosystem, as good an example of nature, in the Emersonian sense of not-me, as we have in New England.² It is, of course, a land shaped by human intention, divided among landowners with different goals and valued by people with vastly different attitudes and agendas—differences this volume will attempt to chart. Yet all these people share, broadly, a sense of the Maine Woods as a distinct place with a unique identity, rather than as a vaguely realized backdrop for human dramas that could happen anywhere. And at this moment, the dramas unfolding in the Maine Woods are undergoing a significant change. The shifts in the paper industry that drove the vast sell-off of holdings in the Maine Woods at the end of the last century are still reverberating through the human-land community, as large swaths of the Maine Woods pass to different owners contemplating different uses. The region is up for grabs in a way that few others are in the United States, as Indian tribes reclaim traditional territory, real estate developers lure vacationers from distant urban centers, preservationists campaign for conservation land and new national parks, guides tout the region’s natural beauty, hunters and fishermen seek to preserve access to treasured waters and lands, and rural towns try to hang on to a viable population and economic base in a rapidly changing world no longer defined by paper mills. In viewing this rapidly transforming landscape, Thoreau’s writings serve as a useful mirror, reflecting the region as it went through an earlier period of radical transformation; his writings, too, with their varied and at times contradictory statements about the region, serve as a point of reference for many of the people reimagining the land today.

Thoreau’s own attitudes serve as a pretty good index for evolving ideas about the American environment in general and the Maine Woods in particular. His earliest publication about the region, Ktaadn (1848), appeared in a New York–based journal, Sartain’s Union Magazine, that celebrated westward expansion and manifest destiny. Maine, in this context, was but one frontier of an expanding nation, one story of American progress, a more writerly counterpoint to George Jackson’s survey of Maine’s resources, the Report on the Geology of Maine (1837), and John Singer’s celebration of the timber industry in Forest Life and Forest Trees (1851). Thoreau’s first view of the Maine Woods—as raw material for a new nation and a place to forge the rugged individualism essential to the American character—fitted well within the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner that dominated American history at the end of the nineteenth century. This triumphalist narrative of emerging nationalism has a counterpoint, one that mourns the pristine wilderness degraded or destroyed by settlement. Both privilege what Richard W. Judd terms first nature, either as adversary to be tamed or Edenic paradise to be, if possible, preserved, and both see modern American society as inimical to nature.

Thoreau’s later Maine essays, however, begin to articulate a different attitude toward the environment, one that instead imagines human society living in a more sustainable relationship with a resilient, if transformed, environment—a stance Judd terms second nature. One marker of this changed perspective is Thoreau’s shift from the framework of national expansion to one of tourism. Chesuncook, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, and The Allegash and East Branch, which was collected in The Maine Woods in 1864, fitted comfortably in the growing field of travel writing that fed the nascent tourist industry that has helped define Maine ever since. The publication of the volume, along with Cape Cod and selections from the journals, revived interest in Thoreau after his death; he took his place at the head of American nature writers who found an increasing audience in the late nineteenth century.

Thoreau’s writing became a touchstone for people venturing into the Maine Woods. While some used Walden (1854) as a template for their own experiments in living simply, most measured their own excursions in the woods, waters, and mountains of Maine against Thoreau’s journeys a generation, or two or three, before. Some, like Fannie Eckstorm, critiqued his woodcraft; others, like John McPhee, sought to faithfully retrace his steps.³ All used his writings to bring people to the region, helping to lodge the Maine Woods in the national imagination as a place apart from an urban, industrializing America, a place where one could reconnect with a primal nature seen as increasingly remote from most Americans’ daily lives. Walden helped refashion the pastoral for the American scene, capturing, in Leo Marx’s formulation, the tension between nature and industry that drove the country’s complex relationship with its environment. The Maine Woods, on the other hand, symbolized the wild, unsettled landscape that had become increasingly entwined with the nation’s identity since the writings of James Fenimore Cooper and the paintings of Thomas Cole in the early nineteenth century, a symbol of divine favor and a marker of a simpler, purer American character than the nation’s European counterparts, even as the country gathered its industrial might and emerged as a world power. For the elite in the burgeoning American metropolises, a sojourn in the Maine Woods helped underscore their American identity.

Meanwhile, the Maine Woods were becoming less and less remote. The same railroads that brought lumber and paper from its increasingly managed forests brought tourists to hotels and summer cottages scattered across its lakes, where they were served by a growing cadre of guides who moved back and forth between the timber and tourist industries. Publications like In the Maine Woods (printed annually by the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad in the early twentieth century) noted how convenient and accessible wilderness hotels and hunting camps were to urban clients. In the post–World War II era, as the paper industry intensified, Thoreau was enlisted in efforts to preserve parts of the Maine Woods, particularly the Allagash River. Thoreau’s arguments for wildness and his call for national preserves became something of an environmental gospel. Thoreau had long been quoted by environmentalists fighting to protect iconic landscapes against the forces of economic exploitation. John Muir, for example, carried a copy of The Maine Woods on his first journey to Alaska, and he eagerly enlisted Thoreau in his efforts to preserve wilderness landscapes in California and beyond.⁴ As environmental writing became an increasing focus for scholars, Thoreau took on a defining role in ecocriticism, particularly in the work of Lawrence Buell, whose landmark book The Environmental Imagination (1996) places Walden firmly at the center of American writing that sought to recalibrate the emerging nation’s relationship with the environment. For other ecocritics, Thoreau’s Maine essays serve as important case studies, his experience on Mount Katahdin a key exhibit in the wilderness sublime and his call for national parks a founding document. Richard Schneider’s collection of essays Thoreau’s Sense of Place (2000) shows how multifaceted this effort became in a few short years, with a range of scholars tracing how Thoreau’s environmental sensibility flows from—and to—such fields as natural philosophy, geography, developmental biology, climate studies, evolution, aesthetics, and phenomenology. Thoreau was placed squarely in the center of a movement that began on the edge of Concord and spread to global efforts to preserve a threatened planet a century and a half later.

Inevitably, there was a backlash against this view of Thoreau as the patron saint of the environmental movement—one that was captured in a more recent collection of essays, Maine’s Place in the Environmental Imagination (2008), edited by Michael D. Burke. While some scholars traced elements of Thoreau’s radical environmental vision, others highlighted the human costs of the preservation movement and broadened the range of writers in the conversation. Critics of the parks movement in Maine noted how little time Thoreau actually spent in Maine, seeing him as part of a broader trend to control Maine’s lands from afar. Local activists debating a post-timber future of the Maine Woods weren’t sure why a tourist from Massachusetts had such an outsize voice in shaping their region and called attention to writers with far-deeper ties to the state who were obscured by Thoreau’s shadow. A new wave of environmentalist scholarship, led by William Cronon and Mark Spence, questioned a strategy focused on wild spaces that took attention away from more pervasive problems and often obscured the human toll of creating parks newly freed from a long human presence. In this context, critics such as Joshua Bellin noted that Thoreau’s attitudes toward the Penobscot Indians he met, admiring at best, were full of savagist scorn at their worst, and others pointed out that he had negative things to say about local settlers, lumbermen, hunters, politicians, merchants—really, just about everyone with a stake in the Maine Woods.⁵ The things that make Thoreau perennially interesting to scholars—his crafted, complex prose, his willingness to follow the ambiguous and branching trail of his own evolving perceptions and attitudes, his penchant to rethink and reframe pronouncements he made a few pages before—make him an uneasy spokesman for any one cause. Yet this also makes him a remarkably effective spokesman for recent efforts to forge a mixed-use framework for the Maine Woods, one that accommodates a range of overlapping interests and purposes for the region.

Reimagining Place

More broadly, this effort to reimagine the American environment in general and the Maine Woods in particular, to negotiate the vastly different histories and uses people have brought to the region, and to better understand the complex interplay between the environment and the human, is a useful exemplar in our efforts to think through our understanding of place. One way of doing so follows the course set out by phenomenology, charting the subtle ways different spaces are infused into our consciousness. This is a delicate dialectic, in which physical forms grow entangled with personal psychology and cultural structures in ways that are as powerful as they are difficult to consciously acknowledge. For Martin Heidegger, to truly inhabit a place—to dwell—is to live with a full awareness of these dimensions, of mythic past and material present, an awareness that shimmers into being only as a person builds a life purposefully woven into a certain place. For Heidegger, such a process was at odds with modernity, and his politics carry