Thoreau's Dream - preserving the Kennebec river area

The philosopher from Concord envisioned a preserve in the "moosy, moosey" Maine Woods. Is it still worth saving?

Last August I joined a whitewater expedition down the East Outlet of Moosehead Lake in the heart of the 3.2-million-acre Maine Woods National Park and Preserve. Here, at the top of the Kennebec, the stacks of standing waves were plenty high enough to intimidate the tough inner-city kids of Boy Scout Troop 263 out of Hartford, Connecticut.

Big woods and clean water were alien to them. "I'm nervous," announced one as we spun down the current in our inflatable "ducky" kayaks. "I don't know how to paddle," cried another. All of them flipped at least once. At the storied "Swimming Hole" rapid, half a dozen opted for portage, saying, "No way, man."

But after the remaining seven survived the plunge, everybody carried their duckies back upriver and relaunched, their bright, plastic helmets vanishing in whirlpools and geysers. For an hour I watched as they shouted, swam, bobbed, and scampered up the steep banks--future advocates of Maine Woods National Park and Preserve, which (I probably should admit) doesn't exist yet.

In the flat stretches I lay back, looking at the green canopy rushing past, remembering my youth and thinking about the changes I had seen in Maine. I was not much older than the scouts when I'd worked at the Kennebec Log Driving Company, negotiating this water in a life jacket, stabbing mid-river jams with a peavey and hauling myself up onto them. I'd extract logs with increasing care until the whole jam would shudder and I'd leap back into the flow with an acre of surging pulpwood 20 feet behind me.

Until 1976 the public couldn't use rivers like the upper Kennebec because they were reserved for the paper industry as conduits to get logs to downriver mills, and it couldn't use the lower rivers either because effluent from the mills rendered the water a health hazard. At Indian Pond, where the scouts and I hauled out, and again at West Forks, where the river falls and spreads from a brawling run, the logs used to be corralled by booms in huge rafts that covered nearly every surface acre for the 35 miles to Solon. Driving along Route 201, you could smell the rafts with the windows closed--nothing woodsy, more reminiscent of an uncapped landfill.

Along the lower Kennebec, where the paper mills swilled logs and belched sulfurous bile, the odor took on a new character--basically boiled cabbage gone bad. On damp autumn mornings it used to drive me out of the grouse woods and back into classes at Colby College. In Waterville, just upstream from where I hunted ducks, the pulp logs reentered the river in their final, processed form--as toilet paper. When the flow dropped during off-peak generating periods, the gray strips hung from snags and alders like Spanish moss. And in summer, fish carcasses, silver bellies sunward, shot down the methane-charged current as prolifically and predictably as the Perseid meteors.

But in 1997, on the 25th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, I floated the same section, spying mussels and smallmouth bass ten feet down and catching two-pound brown trout on dry flies. Environmentalists had gotten the log drives banned four years after President Nixon signed the act. To their horror, the response of the paper industry was to carve up the North Woods with about 25,000 miles of haul roads. Habitat became fragmented, and remote brook-trout ponds, shielded from a ravenous public by a morning's hike, were suddenly accessible by station wagon.

It is this sort of abuse that Maine Woods National Park and Preserve is designed to prevent. The dream was hatched by brash, in-your-face people from Concord, Massachusetts, who call themselves "RESTORE: The North Woods." For anyone who loves wild things and wild places and has watched the razing of the North Woods by multinational paper companies, it's the kind of dream you don't want to wake up from.

Protected would be the headwaters of six major rivers, including the Allagash, most of Moosehead Lake, hundreds of other lakes and ponds, and the hundred wildest miles of the Appalachian Trail. Park advocates, including the Sierra Club, have been distributing realistic National Park Service-style guides written as if the park/ preserve already exists; and scarcely a summer day passes without some tourist asking paper company pooh-bahs how to get to the national park. It drives them nuts.

As the park guide explains, hunting, trapping, and snowmobiling would be prohibited in the park, while whitewater rafting, canoeing, kayaking, fishing, and camping would be permitted. In the preserve--the size of which is yet to be determined--all existing recreation would continue.

The park proposal shook the conservative Pine Tree State. The "wise-use" crowd spewed rhetoric. "A wilderness forest produces nothing," proclaimed Robert Voight of the Maine Conservation Rights Institute. "Who is going to stop this enviro madness, this social revolution, this destitution of our great Constitution? The fire of tyranny is raging." Even some environmental groups talked up "traditional land uses" and warned about culture shock.