Cabin Life. Chapter One. Introducing the reader to Carl Johnson 'of course'

Chapter 6: Maine Camps

Maine Camps

Jerry and I left Brunswick in 1976 in a car leaking brake fluid. Things in the Brown household were less than perfect. It was good to be out of it and on the road. We headed northwest while a light autumn rain fell all along Maine's central highways. Plain country greeted us, patches of deciduous trees just beginning to change color, woods thrown across a landscape as flat as Kansas. In their midst, decaying paper mill towns offered polluted rivers and bad food; the inhabitants thought both were good enough. Further in, at Greenville, rich New Yorkers had arrived by private plane for their guided adventure. They strode about, dressed by L.L. Bean, while scruffy outfitters eager for City cash did the heavy lifting. The seaplanes that bobbed on Moosehead Lake waited to take Manhattanites into the deep reaches, where the deer and the landlocked salmon were thick.

The Weyerhaeuser Corporation let us in for a more modest venture. We did not know what to write in the registry regarding our destination. "Let's try Ragged Lake," my cousin suggested. An old map loaned by a friend placed campsites at its edge. It was a 2-mile walk from a road and at the moment we did not fear the trek and favored isolation. Into the lumberyard timber we went, driving across a horizontal terrain broken only by the bulk of Big Spencer and, in the distance, the incomparable Katahdin. When we left the car, still miles from the Lake, we shouldered bad packs and we fared badly. The trails disappeared. The earth had covered the wounds of the Company's clearcutting with a scar tissue of thistles. The underbrush cut like a knife, wrapped vines around our thighs, deposited ticks on our calves. The ecology of the industrial forest added insult to injury. Low swampy places smelled like piss on the latrine floor in a lumberman's tavern. Something rotted. Dank as it was, it resembled the Southwestern desert in that each route chosen was a bad choice.

Three hours in, we stumbled upon Ragged Lake. We broke through the thickets to a copse of birch trees, the walking smooth and a fine camp site cleared out next to the lake. Fresh water fell from a small rock face near the site. The season's first freeze had relieved us of the murderous mosquitoes. The weather was cool, the day's warmth just fading. On the far side of the lake, we could see a decrepit fishing hut. Nothing else disturbed its shores; we were in the Maine Thoreau had once passed through, lamenting the sawyers brute work on virgin timber.

As dusk settled in, the loons began their appeals. Screams echoed across the lake and echoed again where the water opened up into another lagoon further out, and then in the lagoon beyond that, a ragged shoreline. Mad complaints made by mad birds. They were driven crazy by the stars. The points of light shone in the black sky and they glimmered again on the mirror of the black water. In the morning, the sun took up the whole place with a light hand. The flat terrain let it grab the whole solid mass of northern woods in a sudden illumination like those blasts of light from the heavens in Spanish Golden Age painting. Its grasp got weakened only where mist rising off the water blurred the bays and lagoons and flats that gave the indeterminate lake its name. Geese that had honked on our arrival had departed early that morning for South Carolina but a great fishing bird worked the water 150 yards away. The forest was more beautiful in this long perspective across a blue canvas than up close, where three centuries of rude lumbering had stunted it. Looked at across the water, it was a deeply woven blue green carpet of god's doing.

We smoked dope and drank whiskey. We skipped stones and competed over the number of jumps achieved. I led by a great margin until Jerry started to compliment me on my ability and express the conviction that he could never catch up. That disturbed my aim. We talked about his faltering marriage and my new love affair. We talked about our Southwest. At night, we sang in a harmony of sorts Don Maclean's homage to Van Gogh, my cousin's musical skill compensating for my lack of talent. After two nights and two days, two dirty men fitted up. With burdens on their backs, they moved out. Once more we fell forward and backward in the vines and thistles like clowns crazy as loons. Coming through one inhuman thicket, we stopped dead in our tracks. Ten yards ahead, a bull moose looked upon us in an unfriendly manner, drool running down his maw. My first sight of such in the wild. What I remember is a set of grinding teeth beneath a purposeful nose attached to a horned head. Vaguely, in the rear of that image, was a beast the size of an elephant. As he stood there glowering, it became clear why he was built that odd way; those long skinny legs carried his brute mass above the nasty brush and into the waters where the lilies float.