Willem's Yankee Notebook - April 1, 2007 - Dogsledding Into Wilderness

MUSHING THROUGH MAINE WITH A PACK OF HAPPY FRIENDS

KOKADJO, ME ¬ This is a point of view I've never before experienced. Just ahead of me, six bushy canine tails wave in the spring sun; and just ahead of each, a pair of short, erect Arctic-style ears points straight up. Beneath my poorly padded bottom, the sled runners swish, rumble, or grate as we pass from snow to ice to gravel. And just behind and above me, the musher, Steve, alternates between shouting to his dogs and sharing his and my personal histories and philosophies.

The woods on either side have been scalped several times. The trail is lined with alder saplings, with spruces poking up beyond. This may be the great North Woods, but they've long been a working forest more than a sylvan Shangri-la. That appears to be changing a bit.

It's just six hours over here from our spot in the Connecticut Valley, and just short of 300 miles. Mother and I ran US Route 2 over here with our kids for years, headed to and from our summer jobs off the coast of Maine. I'd forgotten how straight the roads are through the woods, dipping and twisting only at each village, where a rapid in the local stream once dictated a mill and a bridge. The highway was thinly populated, mostly by empty paper mill chip trucks that left a sawdusty trail in the air behind them, and commuters with Maine plates, all going like a bat out of Hell. I must have passed at least a hundred Arctic Cats for sale beside the road.

The old familiar names flowed past ¬ Lancaster, Gorham, Bethel, Rumford, Mexico ( a reminder of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when Maine became a state and acquired dozens of whimsical world-atlas names), Skowhegan, Greenville. From Greenville it's another hour north over an increasingly rustic road, which the locals claim eventually turns into a cow path, then a deer trail, and finally a squirrel trail running up a tree and into a hole. I didn't go quite that far. After a quick stop to pick up a burger at the Kokadjo roadhouse, I rattled six or seven miles up a spring-pocked dirt road to Medawisla, a traditional Maine sporting camp, on Second Roach Pond, that's recently been taken over by the Appalachian Mountain Club.

The AMC, whose White Mountain huts are pretty well filled whenever they're open, has undertaken to preserve and revive some of the old Maine camps. Besides Medawisla (Abenaki for loon), they've acquired West Branch Pond Camps and Little Lyford Pond Camps. This summer they'll probably open a fourth, at Chairback Mountain. Arranged in a string an easy day's hike, ski, or snowshoe apart, they provide the opportunity for camp-to-camp travel.

Thirty feet ahead of me, big Roy is destroying all my preconceptions of the character of a lead dog. Raised on tales of Buck, White Fang, and Sergeant Preston's famous King, I've thought of them as preternaturally sagacious, single-minded, and intuitive powerhouses. Roy is powerful, all right, but not much of a disciplinarian. When Steve shouts,"Straight on, Roy!" he does it unfailingly; but "Gee, Roy!" produces the desired right turn only about two-thirds of the time. It's almost spring here now, and tussocks of grass beside the trail have to be inspected and peed upon. Behind him on the same side, Jackson and Keno also have to make their contributions before we take off again. "That's one good thing about female dogs," says Steve. "They don't have to do that all the time." A partridge crossing the trail a hundred yards beyond a junction threatens disaster, but somehow Roy resists and leads us successfully to the right this time.

The acquisition of the sporting camps and the protection of thousands of acres of Maine forest land are part of the AMC's Maine Woods Initiative, designed to provide a little organization and muscle to the constant effort to balance logging, development, and recreational use. The Appalachian Trail passes close by here, on its tortuous way through one of the trail's most infamous sections, the 100-Mile Wilderness, which runs from Monson to the entrance of Baxter State Park. One of the club's goals is to widen the buffer zone (in which logging is not permitted) on both sides of the trail. Another is to practice sustainable forestry on a 37,000-acre tract it's acquired elsewhere in the area. The preservation of the old camps is critical. They'll attract a different clientele in years to come than they have in the past; but one look at the trout hole in the Roach River just below Medawisla, and I resolved to return myself in May or June.

Up ahead of me in the bright sunlight the six tails wag happily, but I can begin to see differences in their owner's personalities. They're harnessed side-by-side in pairs on either side of a central line. Up front, Roy and Stanzi (named after Mozart's wife) trot along, with Stanzi, the oldest dog in the team, taking her cues from the much stronger Roy. Steve says it's her last year on the long runs, which I find unbearably sad. Behind those two are Jackson and Ripley. Ripley is a lovely Siberian, brown as a deer with perfect, tiny ears. She seems to love physical contact, and is forever slipping under the central line to trot on the other side of it with Jackson, their hips moving in unison. Just in front of me are the wheel dogs, Keno and Little Bug. Little Bug is huge. Now and then he looks around at me as if to ask when I might try a few hundred yards afoot. Sorry, not today, Bug. But of all the dogs', his line is tightest; he leans on his harness with his hind feet wide apart, like a grizzly bear's. Some of the team are "rescue dogs," given up when they grew from adorable little balls of fuzz into large, demanding animals requiring lots of exercise and stimulation.

Steve, who owns and runs Song in the Woods Dogsled Adventures (cf. his web site), is, like me, an old Outward Bound instructor, so we have lots to talk about ¬ mostly the joy of having found our way into our respective zones of bliss, and enjoying a perfect day in the great north woods, along with some of the happiest and most enthusiastic companions in the world.